We had a fairly productive week with both Georgie and Vicki. I finally set up mini-office/dividers for them. Mini-offices are used to display useful information for the children to use while doing their schoolwork and can serve the additional purpose of providing a barrier that keeps them from “helping” each other with their work. This was a big problem I had whenever I tried to work with Vicki while Georgie was anywhere near.
I used a foam tri-fold presentation board, cut it in half horizontally and then removed one side panel (the side where I sit to help them). Because the cut foam board edge was ragged I temporarily covered it with masking tape. Since the pictures were taken I have bought pink and blue/purple tie-dye duct tape.
Vicki’s board shows her full name, the Handwriting without Tears guide sheet for the upper case alphabet, an alphabet with pictures and a number/counting sheet.
Georgie’s board has his full name, our address, home phone number, my cell phone number and daddy’s cell phone number, a sticker about money, the months of the year, days of the week, a hundreds chart, two number lines – 0 through 20 and 0 through 100 counting by 10’s, and the Handwriting without Tears guide sheet showing upper and lower case letters and numbers. When he saw his board for the first time he came up and gave me a big hug and said “Thanks for my board mommy. You’re the best. You always know what will help me.” Awww, so sweet. He really appreciated the HWT sheet since he often feels like he has to flip back in his book to see how to form letters. It also led to him writing quite a bit of his math by himself. Having the numbers written out in front of him gave him much more confidence.
Also on Georgie’s board is a blank area where I can pin up whatever is relevant to our current week. Right now I have our current word list for American Sign Language.
We use two adjustable folding tables for the kids to work on now and the boards are binder clipped together and sit on the edge of the two tables. They are sturdy enough to stand independently but clipping them together makes them a little more stable with two little kids using them.
VICKI
Vicki did a few pages from Get Ready for the Code. She’s definitely more cooperative doing written work than she was a few months ago but I still am not having her do the pages that are just tracing and writing the letters. We are doing Handwriting without Tears for handwriting and I don’t want her getting confused with different formats.
That said, we didn’t do much Handwriting without Tears this week. She mainly played around with the capital letter cards and pieces. Our next lessons will involve building Mat Man with the wood pieces and then drawing him.
She is doing well with the math sheets I printed for her from Evan Moor Teacher File Box, although there was one this week that involved cutting out bones to see if there were enough to give each dog one. She decided she didn’t want to cut out the bones, she wanted to cut “nothing” – her term for blank pieces of paper. Since cutting is a skill that her and Georgie both need to work on, I let her go to it.
I’m keeping the workbooks pretty light for her so far. She does one page from Get Ready for the Code, one activity from Handwriting without Tears which will only sometimes be a workbook page and one page of math from Evan Moor. The rest is fully hands-on games and activities.
This week she played with our Tag US map. She liked playing the music from different parts of the country and dancing along.
GEORGE
HANDWRITING: George just completed one 2 page lesson in HWT this week. Things went much easier once I set up the mini-office board with the guide sheet. Unfortunately it was almost the end of the week before I had them ready.
PHONICS/READING: We didn’t do any OPGTR or ETC this week.
MATH: George did get through 3 pages of Math Mammoth this week including completely writing out two pages for himself.
GRAMMAR: He did two lessons from our Scholastic GUM and McMillian Treasure grammar programs. I think he’s getting bored with deciding if something is a question or an exclamation so I may skip ahead if there is much more of that. So far all the grammar ideas are coming very easy to him.
SPELLING: We finished our review of Steps 12 through 15 of AAS this week. Next week we will start new lessons with Step 16.
Also this week, we took a nice walk looking for signs of Autumn (but didn’t really find any) which can be seen here…..
we cheered for Steph as she cheered for her high school football team….
and we finally moved on to the Permian Period in our prehistory study, including a visit to our local museum, which can be seen here.
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