Weekly Wrap-Up 11/1 – 11/12/10 (2 weeks)

This week’s wrap-up covers two weeks since I never posted about our post-Halloween week.    We did do a few activities from our core curriculum that week but mainly what we accomplished was:

-two kids on Halloween candy induced sugar highs
-one Mommy on Halloween candy induced sugar crash (I never seem to get the energy boost anymore)
-one little girl who swallowed a penny
-one little girl with a cold
-one big girl getting behind the wheel of a car for the first time ever (and hitting a curb and getting a flat tire on the driving instructors car)
-two doctor’s appointments
-one little boy’s last soccer game of the year
-one big girl cheering at the last regular season football game of the year but we’re going to the Play-offs!

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Georgie is still resisting writing lowercase letters.  He insists they are much harder than uppercase.  I am thinking about printing out some paper with wider spaced lines and seeing if that helps.  I’m thinking that since a lot of the lowercase letters mainly use only the bottom half (below the dotted line) of the paper that the writing small is what he dislikes.     He did complete one practice page of all lowercase letters a, b, c, d, e and f and one page of upper and lowercase G’s.  He’s finding lots of ways to make his work more interesting.  He often chooses multiple colors and talks to them, asking whose turn is it next and doing patterns.


All About Spelling is still going well.  We finished up short I words and did the entire step of short O words.  We also discussed what words should be capitalized.  He has a good understanding of it but of course he’s writing everything in capital letters at this point.   We do the lessons using a mix of the tiles, the white board and orally that seems to be working very well for him.  So far there have been very few words he even has to think about before spelling them.

Explode the code is also still going well.  He sometimes whines at the pages that require more writing and he sometimes asks for me to do the writing but I usually insist he do it.  There usually isn’t much and I do let him do his all caps.

Georgie really loves to read books now.  We have a pretty good collection of kids books and he’s started reading them to Vicki.  He can’t always read every word but he seems able to read enough to tell the story and not get frustrated.

We completed Lessons 24, 25 and 26 in MEP. He really enjoys the nice mix of activities.  A lot of our math work I do write for him.   A lot of the spaces are small and the discussion/understanding is more important to me than being able to write the answer down.

We did some addition practice.  He completed a Grade 1 workbook page and played domino parking lot.

In Time, we moved on from time to the hour to time to the half hour.  He had some trouble with the concept at first and kept wanting to point the minute hand to 3 (for 30?) but he seemed to understand it better by the end of the week.  We used to have a digital clock that sat right by our clock face but Stephanie took back her docking bay (that I had "borrowed") ;-) so we need to set up another one.

We moved on to dimes in our Money workbook.  Georgie has a little trouble telling apart the nickels and dimes.  He also had some trouble paying attention and at times just sat guessing the answer.   Once he can do quarters we have the Money Bags game that will help reinforce the coin values.  I may have to take a look at it and see if there’s a way we can adapt it to use just the coins we’ve covered so far.  Games seem to really help him to understand and remember concepts.

Vicki did a lot of painting this week.  She still loves the Paintastic pens.  I still love the reduced mess and that the paintings actually dry fairly quickly since the amount of paint distributed is controlled.
She also did a lot of stickers this week.  I hadn’t pulled them out in a while so they were new and fun again.

One of the items that were in her “Tot Boxes” this week were the Melissa and Doug lacing cards.  She has never actually done these by lacing them.  Instead she puts the lace through holes on either side of the neck and drags her “pets” around by their “leash”.

She played on the computer while George and I worked on money.  I did not want anymore swallowed coins and the computer is the one thing guaranteed to keep her attention.  She loves playing on Starfall, Nick Jr and PBS Kids.

Vicki sat down and “read” Brown Bear, Brown Bear to me.   She actually just has the story memorized but she really enjoyed reading just like her brother.

She did two counting worksheets I found at TLS Books, which has free worksheets for Preschool through Fifth Grade.  They were very simple – count the clowns, seals, bears and circle the correct number.   She also played her game where she rolled the dice and filled in the correct number of squares using a stamper.

For our Electives, we did a discussion of History.  We read the “What is History” pages from Story of the World and made a personal timeline of the kids lives.  We started with the most recent events and worked back from there to show events going into the past.  We discussed how we know about what happened in the past and looked through their baby books.  We also read Then and Now which compares various scenes from long ago with how they would look now (horse and buggy versus cars, etc.) and The Quilt Story which was a cute story about a quilt that is handed down.


We pulled out our rice bin and our Fall Sensory Bin this week.  I let the kids add the rice from the Fall bin to the rice bin.  Georgie had fun “feeding” rice to a rubber snake and then having it spit it into a cup.



From now until December were going to concentrate on our Core subjects and some fun crafts and games for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

We’re also going to be visiting our local museum more frequently.  I went to a Tricky Tray with my mother and won a One Year Family Membership!!  I’m so happy since I’ve been wanting to go to the museum more often.  It is the perfect size for these guys with lots of fun interactive stuff.

I also won passes to a local zoo but those are going to have to wait until Spring and warmer weather.