We started the week with a field trip to the museum for a special Peaceful Dove Craft in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. day. We also read a book about him but didn’t find a lot of resources that were at a simple enough level for these guys.
Georgie is doing great with reading. He was able to read all (every single word!) of Green Eggs and Ham by himself this week. We are up to short U words in ETC and AAS. Only short E words are left and we start on long vowels. Obviously he is reading beyond the level we are officially teaching but we will continue to work through our curriculums to make sure there are no gaps.
Georgie was very excited to see the magnetic board and letter tiles again after so many weeks off. He immediately noticed the three new tiles (sh, ch and th) and wanted to make some words with them right away. Unfortunately there aren’t many words that can be made with just those and one other tile (shy and the were the only ones I could think of) so he got a little frustrated. I had to remind him of the “every word has at least one vowel” rule and that helped settle his frustration.
He was feeling very energetic this week and decided to act out the words after spelling them. It was a good set of words for action: up (jumped up on the back of the couch), fun (danced around having fun), bug (went on a bug hunt, Vicki played the bug and he “caught” her), sun (ran to the window to look at the sun), run (ran around) and bus (pretended to drive a bus). Surprisingly (not), at this point he was really tired and decided to spell the rest of the words orally without the accompanying action.
Math is going well. He’s still enjoying MEP but I’m finding it very slow moving so I’m considering switching to Math Mammoth when the Homeschool Buyers Co-op has it’s special sale in March.
Georgie has mastered time to the hour and the 1/2 hour and we will be moving on to the quarter hours next week. We will also be doing more with elapsed time.
In Money, we’ve introduced quarters. We may have to slow down with this soon since some of the addition needed is going to get beyond him. He’s doing wonderfully with single digit addition but adding 25+25+10+5+3 is a little beyond him at this point. We still play Money Bags quite a bit so he’ll probably memorize some values (say for 2 quarters) without actually understanding how to get there. He can count by fives and tens which helped a lot with dimes and nickels.
Writing is going about the same. He still resists writing lowercase letters. I put some wider spaced lines on one of the lap whiteboards to see if that will help.
We did some drawing on the chalkboards this week. Georgie loves to draw animals and aliens. I'm thinking of adding an art curriculum sometime in the Fall but I'm not sure what would be right for him. He loves to draw but does NOT like to be told what to draw or how to do his artwork. I'm looking for an art curriculum that has some guidelines but then lets the project be very individual. I'm not sure such a thing exists.
He also spent some time quizzing Vicki using her Brainquest card decks.
The kids got their hands on my camera a few times this week and decided to do a photography independent study.
They even figured out how to switch to black and white pictures.
How artistic! They also managed to change the preview setting and it took me two days to figure out how to change it back.
Coming up: we’ll be starting our Habitats and Continents studies.
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