Weekly Wrap-Up

We’ve had a few light weeks lately due to Steph’s end of the year craziness and Georgie’s vacation with Granny Franny.    We do school year round but summer brings more field trips and nature experiences. 

Steph’s dance recital (her 14th!!) was last weekend.  She had a great time, all the dancers looked wonderful and the grandparents were very impressed.   We head to Nationals next weekend and another year is over.

We will be spending lots of time at our pool this summer.  This is great exercise for the kids and usually wears them out, which is a bonus.  We usually go down in the morning since the kids are very fair and I try not to have them spend a lot of time in the sun in the hottest part of the day.  There is a canopy down at the pool now so I may start bringing down lunch and we can sit in the shade to eat.

This week we went on a field trip to a local zoo that I haven’t been to in many years.  (more about that here)

I finally broke down and ordered the wooden capital letter pieces from Handwriting without Tears for Vicki.  When we first ordered the program, I made up my own capital letter cards and used thick foam to make pieces.  Unfortunately, Vicki (aka Little Miss Destructo) has already….destroyed quite of few of them.   The wooden pieces should have a better survival rate, plus there seems to be many extra pieces in the set.   I introduced these this week and she enjoyed exploring them but didn’t spend much time forming letters.

One of her favorite things to play with is our Unifix blocks.  I had to order Steph’s summer reading books from Amazon so I threw a book on Developing Mathematics with Unifix in the order to get some extra ideas for activities to do with them.  Georgie also loves the unifix blocks and since the book is for Grades K-3, I’m sure I’ll find activities for him in there too.

Vicki also played with our bottle cap letter matching games…..

and her wipe-off books.  She’s actually started to trace the letters and numbers in these books instead of just scribbling but she always (ALWAYS) colors her hands, fingernails and/or face with the markers.

What Georgie did in his core curriculum this week:

Handwriting without Tears:
practiced numbers, Cc, Oo and Ss on paper; pg 18 and 19 in book – Vv and Ww.

Reading:
OPGTR Lessons 50 and 51.  We are coming across some issues in the reading lessons due his pronunciation of words.  He has a slight lisp and some difficulty pronouncing certain words/sounds.  It’s causing him some frustration with these lessons, which leads him to wanting to rush through them which of course makes it worse.
He read lots of books this week but they were all ones he read before.  I did order him a few new beginning readers.  I’m still trying to figure out a way to give him more access to books while keeping Vicki away from them since she still tends to rip things (although supposedly it’s more often “accidental” these days).

Phonics:
We added ETC back into our schedule this week.  He completed pg 1-8 in ETC2.   ETC is covering many of the same words we are currently doing in OPGTR (beginning blends) but for some reason he has less trouble with ETC. 

Spelling:
We didn’t do any AAS this week.

Grammar:
Scholastic GUM – Lesson 2 and pg 12 on Action Words, Lesson 3 and pg 13 on Capitalizing the first word in a sentence.  We did additional practice sheets from MacMillian Treasure grammar workbook.
pg 28 from Scholastic 1st Grade Reading Comprehension and Reading Skills workbook.

Math:
MM Yr 1A: pg 92, 93 111, 113 (addition/subtraction) and Yr 1B: pg 51 (time order) and pg 65 (shapes and measuring).

Next week I hope to get back into our Prehistory study.