Week In Review

The first week of school here was fantastic!! Both kids worked really hard this week, explored a ton, enjoyed many hours of more free flowing learning and had fun!

 

Hudson had a great time learning with his preschool week. This week his theme was centered on apples. He practiced colors, letters, numbers, counting and creating in sets of ten, reading short vowel a words, learned the life cycle of an apple, taste tested eight varieties, looked at an apple tree through a magnifying lens and observation, baked apple hand pies, did a load of art, mastered some fun puzzles, watched a video on apple orchards and the harvest, spent some time on Starfall.com and read a lot of books with me!! An excellent week that he loved with full rich days of learning and playing... he could not get enough of!!

 

Holly also enjoyed an amazing week of third grade! She started the week off with brand new curriculum and a mix of some familiar curriculum too. The week starts off in review for math as she masters some skills learned last year, a book study was kicked off with Little House In The Big Woods, she finished up her chemistry unit with a final project in baking bread from a cold yeast start and a warm yeast start and a review test which she rocked, loads of art, many great books, a look at ancient civilization, learning about history and how we learn from it as she created a history pocket and notebook project, learned about becoming an archaeologist, watched a video on archaeology, jumped into the country of France as we start year two of Expedition Earth, she started a poster from her new health program and did some reflection writing. It has been a full week with so much more than listed... a wonderful week!!

 



Week In Review

This week has been a fun busy week - we were camping at the beginning of the week, had company over throughout the week and kept busy with several school activities and play! A fun week for sure. I always find it hard to really do a 'review' of our week as there is so much to cover... I never know if I should try to write on some of the subjects, bullet point all we've covered, high light the more exciting parts, etc. I'll get this down eventually!

Holly has been working hard 0n her math - adding and subtracting moving into the teens. She does some of her work with manipulative's and some without. Moving into the higher numbers it is challenging her more and she is wanting to use them a lot more. I let her do some and then had her try some without in which she did a fantastic job. We also talked about how she can check her work in reverse - she thought that was pretty cool!

Reading was big in our house this week! We have read so many, many books - we read to her, she reads to us. Holly's reading has just blossomed and she is loving it. Her confidence has really grown and she is not as intimidated to try new words... finding she can be quiet successful! We did our weekly visit to the library and gathered some new books for her casual reading and several Dr. Seuss books for next week.

We added many new spelling words to her knowledge base this week and spent some time on various word sorts, reading and writing games. We played her Silly Sentence game, a game that is a lot of fun and silly indeed. She also practiced writing skills, free form and structured. Her writing is really nice the hard part for me is that Holly really wants to make it all 'cutesy' with curly tails and dots... wonder where she gets that from? Ha, ha.

For art she did her studies of artists, tried new techniques in art and spent time enjoying traditional kids crafts and painting as well.

We are here!

We are here! Holly is still learning. Fun is still being had.

Mom is just slacking on the blog, that is all.

Life is just busy, as we all know. The holidays add that little bit of excitement to the air, activities to the calendar and fun to the day. In the mean time we are still enjoying schooling.

We have been working a lot on our weekly sight words and reading. I finally picked up a couple sets of magnet letters I have been desiring. With them Holly has been practicing her spelling list for the week. She spells them out and reads them to me. We talk about the word. Then we play a game of hang man with the magnet letters on her white board. It is a lot of fun! She is also enjoying a new website called Spelling City http://www.spellingcity.com/ in which we use her weekly words for learning and games. A different way to learn that interests her!

Holly has been reading a lot lately. Really working her way through some tougher words and the idea of doing this on her own. At first she told me she would not like to read to me because she was worried I would stop reading to her. That took a few days to sink in for her that things would not change with our reading. Books are really big in our family and reading to our children will always happen.... as long as they let us!

Art is happening daily, often several times a day. Cooking is happening every couple of days. We are enjoying parks and playing, friends and activities!

We take our weekly trip to the library for a new stock of books, movies and music. The libraries in our area are really wonderful -they have a nice variety as well as many other community offerings too. We are fortunate to have great libraries!

Life is good!

Week In Review

This week Holly has been busy with a lot of fun school projects. We ventured into a lot of art this week, welcomed the fall theme into our home and learning, took some walks, did a ton of reading and enjoyed some fun school games. Holly did a lot with math, letters and reading this week and I saw a large improvement in her skills to match that work.

As well, we have enjoyed some good time outside for play and nature observation. We have also been enjoying a several animals in our yard this week - a couple of different groups of deer, raccoon, squirrels and several birds (flickers, black capped chickadees, robins and hummingbirds). They are all busy feeding or preparing their home sites with collecting a lot of grass/seed materials. It has been very fun!

Week In Review

This week has been a busy one. Along with school we also enjoyed time with friends and family, made two library visits, park time, a few nature walks, a science class and more. It made for a full fun week!

We spent a lot of time on math and numbers this week, working on mastering our counting, writing and reading recognition to one hundred. Holly has also been working on some graphing skills, math counting cubes, manipulative's and patterning. We had fun with some math card games and Chutes & Ladders (to 100) and a couple of strategy games like Othello and Blokus.Holly is working on refining her writing, spending time on letter size. Often she wants to hurry to get to the next project with me, I have to remind her to slow down, take her time and do quality work. She has written some small stories this week, which was a lot fun. As well, we have done a ton of reading this week - Holly reading to me and I am reading to her. A great book week!

A lot of time has been spent on the season of Fall with art work, nature walks, nature journaling, books, hand on projects and collecting. She is having a lot of fun so far with Fall and has decided that 'Fall' will be her new nature station in the house... so stay tuned for some fun photos of that as it develops.

Week In Review

This week we were busy, busy, busy and loving it! Holly really moved along in her math and is now working on addition. We'll be playing a lot more games to support her move up in math. Holly has been able to do simple addition for some time, but I think she finally made the connection of numeric sentences and working larger numbers in her head. She has also been mastering her verbal and one to one counting to one hundred.

We also spent a lot more time enjoying our unit on habitats, watching some various videos together, reading a lot of books, various art project, animal sorting and more! We did a small focus on deserts this week and next week we will choose a new habitat to spend a bit more time on. As well we have a fun project she is going to do of finding mini-habitats in our yard to inspect, journal on and note various living creatures that call those places home. Holly really enjoys this particular subject and would do it all day long if I let her... it is hard to transition out of school for the day quiet often, however we are really working on it.

Our week also included some music, making pizza and cookies, more time studying apples, reading aloud to me, puzzles, fine motor skills, large motor skills and a lot of art! A great week!