Weekly Wrap-Up

We had a short week since I’ve been fighting off a bout of bronchitis that left me barely able to talk and definitely unable to yell.  And of course, it’s impossible to homeschool if you can’t yell.  ;-)

We did okay considering we only did two days of school, one of which featured a little girl who was in tears more than she wasn’t, and one of which featured a little boy who didn’t think we should be doing school since daddy was home.

Vicki is almost done with her Pre-K Handwriting without Tears so I went ahead and ordered her the Kindergarten level book.  In addition, I bought the double-lined chalkboard and supplies.   She was very excited when the box arrived and wanted to try it out right away.  I used the chalkboard to have her work on her name using the wet-dry-try method.    I wrote her name in chalk, let her go over it using a slightly wet sponge, and then write it herself.

She also continued to work on the last few pages in her Pre-K book.

For phonics, I introduced the –et and –ed word families to Vicki.   Since the sentence chart worked so well last week, I set up a new one using the new words. 

She is still reviewing short /a/ words in Explode the Code and put together another flower using –an words. 

Vicki’s reading is coming along well.  She isn’t as quick as Georgie was but she has been moving along at a steady pace.    She seems to have a lot of trouble with sight words but knows “the”, “and”, “is”, “on”, and “I” so far.

She is doing very well with math.  She enjoys doing the Evan Moor Skill Sharpeners Kindergarten math and so far hasn’t had any problems she couldn’t do.  She is on Week 2 in the Evan Moor Daily Math Practice First Grade.   She hasn’t had any trouble with these either but we are taking them very slowly.  I still don’t think she’s ready for Math Mammoth 1 but she may be shortly after the new year.

I bought Cuisenaire rods a few weeks ago since I frequently saw them recommended as one of the best math manipulatives.  They can be used to understand values, addition, subtraction, fractions, and many other ideas.  Unfortunately, after playing with them a few times, Vicki seemed to hate them.  This week I decided to take them out of school-time and move them into the living room with the rest of our school toys.   But first, I sat down on the floor and played with them myself, building steps.   It didn’t take long before Vicki took over.  Hopefully these will end up being worthwhile.

 

As usual, Georgie spent a lot of time complaining about the work being too easy.  

He spent some time reading from the Beast Academy book instead of doing his work and read quite a bit of ahead of where we are working.    We are taking BA very slow so we are just on the second section – triangles.   He did two of the practice pages this week and will finish this section up next week. 

 

Also in math, we are continuing along with the various chapters of Math Mammoth.  We are far enough along in multiplication that I pulled out a blank multiplication chart and we filled it out together.   The 0’s, 1’s, 2’s, 5’s and 10’s were (of course) “too easy”.  He had to think a little harder with the 9’s but understood the pattern pretty quickly.  We will continue filling in the chart and then work on memorizing it.

He is doing very well with his Algebra Readiness Made Easy and I really need to move him up to the Grade 3 book very shortly.   He enjoys doing these and it’s one of the few things he’s willing to do completely on his own

We spent just one day working on All About Spelling 2, Step 3.    He felt all the words were “baby words”, since they were mostly three letter words (using y as a vowel making the long /i/ sounds.   I’ll probably start moving faster with this and emphasis the rules since he often has no trouble spelling the words.

Georgie is still enjoying the Evan Moor reading comprehension units.  This week we did “The Tortoise and the Hare” and “The Fisherman and His Wife”.  

“The Tortoise and the Hare” exercises included vocabulary words like tortoise (obviously), congratulated, embarrassed and boasted, and some activities with antonyms.

“The Fisherman and His Wife” including exercises in sequencing, and comprehension questions.   One of the questions asked “What would you ask for if you caught an enchanted fish?”  Georgie said he would “wish that Pokemon were real and that I had a Wiggly Puff.  That could help me with my sleeping a lot because it has a sleep power.”   His vocabulary words for this story included enchanted, contented, and unusual. 

While Vicki was playing with the Cuisenaire rods, Georgie asked to play with his yellow block things.  After I figured out he was talking about the Base 10 blocks, I pulled them out for him.  They actually played very nicely together until they started having battles.

We finished up our Rock and Mineral study this week by learning about Metamorphic Rocks and the Rock Cycle.

We did enjoy some nice, but chilly, fall weather in between the rainy days.  Vicki discovered she could pump enough to swing “super HIGH!” and they had bubble wars on the patio.