Weekly Wrap-Up

I planned a light week for the kids this week since I had lots of fun stuff on the agenda, including a trip to New York City to the Museum of Natural History and a continuation of our Rock & Mineral study.

Vicki seems to have short /a/ words down pretty well except she always starts off whining about how she doesn’t know.  She sounds them out one letter at a time but is then able to say the full word.   She is still enjoying using the foam shapes to practice the words.  The foam puzzle pieces are from Walmart and each one has a word she’s been learning on an index card taped to it.  I've been trying different things to write on the pieces themselves but so far nothing removes easily.   I start off with the foam pieces and she has to read the word in order to get the piece.  She takes each piece and builds them into a mat on the floor.  Once she has all the pieces, I call out words for her to jump to.  We finished up this week with 24 pieces.

Also in reading, she’s been able to read the first two emergent readers from Hubbard’s Cupboard this week (Jan & Dan and Pam & Sam).  I already had these printed out from when I used them with Georgie.  I took a suggestion from Progressive Phonics and underlined the words she was to read since we haven’t gotten very far in sight words. 

Vicki also seems to finally understand greater than, less than and equals to.   I’ve been building sets for her on the white board using the magnetic foam shapes and having her place the correct symbol in between.

Georgie is just about finished with his Handwriting without Tears 1st Grade book.   I don’t think he is ready for the 2nd grade book with it’s smaller lines so for now, he will just being doing copying work on HWT paper.  I’ve been trying to use sentences from our other subjects, like science or history, or useful information, like months of the year or days of the week, and I may add in the occasional riddle or joke to keep it interesting. 

He actually did a lot of the writing for his programs himself this week.  He filled in his Spectrum Reading Comprehension workbook without my help and did one of our lab sheets on his own.  It may be time to start increasing the amount of writing he does outside of handwriting.

He seems to be getting the idea of carrying with addition from doing his math riddles.  I have probably said “do the ones, THEN do the tens” a million times but he finally seems to be remembering.

We played a few games this week.  Short /a/ words character UNO that I had printed off from Kellys Kindergarten for Georgie years ago.  Vicki had a lot of fun playing and it really helped reinforce the words she’s been learning.

We also played Very Silly Sentences which is great for reinforcing parts of speech.  Vicki couldn’t read many of the words on her own but kept asking me what the different things said, so she’s taking an interest in trying to learn to read.  Georgie loves the funny sentences that come up in this game.  “A pretty banana cooks up the purple fox” and “The shy baby flies on the fast bed” were examples for this week’s game.

We had some interesting visitors to our yard this week.  The one picture didn’t come out well since it was taken at dusk through a window and screen but we evidently have triplet fawns spending each night down our hill.