Weekly Wrap-Up

Another pretty good week of school.  Vicki is really getting into “doing school”.

Vicki

Vicki is continuing to do well with Get Ready for the Code.  I’m having her do one page – front and back – each day that she wants to do school.   We are up to page 28 and have covered the letters b, f and m.

We are doing a variety of math sheets that I printed from the Evan Moor Teacher’s Filebox.  This week we worked on understanding quantities from 1 to 3.  We also did Lesson 4, Activity 1 from MEP. 

We also played a game with our Unifix blocks from the book Developing Mathematics with Unifix.  I made a stack of 4 blocks, then Vicki would roll a die, make a stack with the number on the die and decide if the new stack was bigger or smaller than the original (4 block) stack.  She then filled in the our Unifix steps with cubes.

She also drew Mat Man for the first time.  It’s a little hard to see since she made the arms, legs and face in her favorite color – pink.

George

LANGUAGE ARTS:

We are finally learning long vowel words.  George can already read a bunch of them but it’s exciting to finally be learning how to tell the difference.  We are up to Lesson 67 in Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading and started Book 3 of Explode the Code.

We are slightly more than half way through the First Grade Handwriting without Tears.  This is the subject that gives us the most struggle each day.  I try to do one 2-page lesson each day.  This week we had to spread each lesson out to two days.

We also moved up to the Second Grade Scholastic Reading Comprehension.  George really enjoys reading these short little passages and answering the questions.

MATH:

Math Mammoth is continuing to go well.   We are working completely in 1B and doing a mix of Addition/Subtraction, Place Value, Clocks and Coins.  We should be moving on to 2A in some topics by the end this year.

Both

We spent some time getting ready for Halloween this week.  We played a Halloween Bingo that I made up for the kids.  I wanted to challenge George a little with reading.   I set up a call sheet where each symbol was assigned a number and I rolled three dice to make a selection.  We used plastic spider rings as markers.

The kids also made some decorations using foam stickers.  Pumpkins with masks and hats left over from last year and aliens from a kit I picked up recently.

We took a nice Nature Walk out at Great Swamp this week – see here.