Weekly Report: Nov. 5-9

Language Arts:
Elf got halfway through lesson 6 in ETC, after finishing Lesson 5 on Monday. He read aloud a Level One reader called "We Are Singing" and colored the corrosponding section of his bookworm chart. For copywork (and a quick grammar lesson), he copied the poem "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, and Jack jump over the candlestick", which was also his memorization work for the week. He also wrote about snails in his journal: I fand a snale in our garden (I found a snail in our garden).

Fairy worked on "k" sounds from her Get Ready for the Code. I realized just yesterday that she is more than halfway through this ETC primer already! This means she will likely get through all 3 primers by the end of our school year and be able to start on ETC 1 next fall (yes, I plan ahead). She also worked in her HWOT book, while repetitively singing the alphabet song. She learned the same poem as Elf this week.

For bedtime read-alouds, we're reading the first Harry Potter book. We also read a couple of Amelia Bedelia books, a Frog and Toad book, and several of the Curious George stories.

Math:

We kept up with our Saxon Meeting books. Fairy's color pattern this month is brown-red-red. Elf is keeping his weather chart up-to-date as well.

Elf did 3 drill pages this week - two were adding single digit numbers, and the other was filling in ___ + a given number = 10. He also did 4 regular worksheets, with word problems, simple fractions, telling time, money, number patterns, and addition/subtraction. He used his manipulatives a fair amount for this, especially the (plastic) coins, 10-sticks and 1 cubes.

Fairy worked on 2 worksheets for counting and two for matching a number to a group of objects this week. I need to print out some more worksheets for her from LearningPage or Enchanted Learning, as soon as I get some more ink! She worked with linking cubes and pattern blocks too.

History:

We read Chapter 5 in SOTW - "The First Sumerian Dictator" - and I had Elf do a narration: Sargon wanted to be the ruler of all of the land of Mesopotamia. He fought all the cities. He sent soldiers into all the cities and they made sure the people obeyed without asking questions. Sargon ruled for a long time.

Fairy enjoyed the story too, and wanted to know if she could be a cup-bearer to a king someday.

We also worked on our apple mummification project (see Science below).

Geography:

Elf worked in his MGG (Maps, Globes, Graphs) book on a section about how people affect the land around them. He narrated labels for pictures, and then drew pictures of people building houses, building roads, and gardening.

Fairy colored, at her request, a simple outline map of the continents.

Science:

We are wrapping up our apple mummification project, and I'll post pics of the results next week. The mummified apples are quite light in weight, soft, and dry, whereas the "control" apples are nasty brown slimy things.

I had decided to drop the Animal Encyclopedia studies we were doing, but then the kids saw me shelving the book and asked me to read another section. So we read about animals of the woodlands. I am going to copy a project Elf did last year at his charter school: I will give each kid a forest picture to color, with the canopy level, brush level, earth level, and sub-earth level, and then some cut-outs of animals to color and place in the appropriate areas.

Memorization:

As mentioned before, the kids worked on the "Jack be nimble" poem this week. We also go through the days of the week each morning.

Art:

On Wednesday, Elf has an art class at his charter school. As I am now the classroom assistant for this hour-long class, Fairy gets to go too. This week we made leaf prints with leaves and tempura paint.

At home, we did Advanced Scribble art. I did one as a sample and then had the kids do them. The hardest part was getting them to understand that they did not want to make them really complex.