Weekly Wrap-Up: 3/14 to 3/18

We had another pretty good week despite an excess of outside noise.  We had some trees removed this week which meant 4 days of saws and wood chippers right outside the window.  It made it difficult at times to read-aloud or watch videos but we still managed to get some work done.

Language Arts

This week was a review week in both spelling and phonics.  We completed the short vowels last week so this week I went back and reviewed all the cards we completed in AAS.  Georgie did great – he had no problem spelling any of the words and could do all the sounds on both the Sound cards and the Phonogram cards.  We will be moving on to the next lessons right away.

We continued with our Grammar lessons using the Scholastic books.  We don’t have the readers they recommend using but we were able to do the assignments using readers we do have.   We are still working on nouns and one of the assignment was to go through their reader and find People/Animals, Places and Things and list them in a chart.  We did it using Green Eggs and Ham, without any problem.

Both kids did some writing using the white boards.  Georgie is wearing his “hard” hat so he can go help the construction workers take down the trees.  (NOT!!)

Our Handwriting Without Tears came in so I’ll be spending the weekend adding it to our workfiles.   I hope it will help Georgie to start writing in lowercase letters more. 

Georgie did some reading in his Tag books.  He’s currently going through the TH, CH and SH digraph books.   He is also trying to read EVERYTHING.  Every book I do as a read aloud, every worksheet, every website he wants to try and read it.  He is reading a little ahead of the short vowel words we have completed but not that much so he can only read about 50% of the words in these.  I love that he’s so interested in trying but it’s also frustrating because I’ll be in the middle of reading one paragraph and he’ll suddenly start to work on a completely different paragraph.   It’s making it a little hard to get things completed.  We may have to start moving a little faster on teaching him the phonics rules (especially long vowel words) so he can start sounding out more.

With all the noise and chaos I didn’t take the opportunity to work on Phonics with Vicki.  Hopefully I’ll at least get the chance to see what she already knows next week.

Math

We are continuing along with just MEP until the end of the month when the co-op sale will be completed and we can get our Math Mammoth download.  I can’t wait and I think Georgie will really enjoy it.  He’s definitely ready to start working on place value and getting past single digit addition.

I did some work with Vicki this week.  Using neon colored spoons (left over from Steph’s sweet 16 party) we worked on patterns, more or less and counting.  She didn’t have any problem with simple patterns, counting to 10 or telling which group had more.  I am considering printing out some MEP for her to see how she does with a little bit of structure.  

Physical Education

We were able to start some new exercises this week using the Wii Fit Plus.  Georgie loves the Basic Run Plus where he gets to follow around a kitty.  He did well enough to unlock two additional trails, which he wanted to check out right away so he ended up doing the course about 4 times in one day.  Vicki ran along with him for the first couple of time.  He also liked playing the Hula Hoop and being a penguin catching fish on a tilting iceberg. 

Now that the weather is getting nicer, we also will be spending more time outside.   This week was gorgeous but we didn’t get out much due to the tree removal and next week we’re actually supposed to get some snow (???) but we’re definitely getting there.

Electives

We continued our Geography study this week with Japan.  We have a few more activities to do so will be finishing that up next week.

We did take a day off for some St. Patrick’s Day fun, seen here.