Last week home school review

  Whew, I really have no idea where the time goes.  Last week we started on week 20 of Phonics Road.  I realize now that I skipped a review of week 19, not sure what happened there.  We did it though, because the complete sheet and book is in the Apprentice binder.
     Nothing new to introduce, just spelling words and the illustrating of a book.  The same actually goes for this week as well.  So we reviewed a little of the days of the week, worked in some categorizing and then a worksheet on observation.  I know some weeks may not seem like much, but don't forget, we do a lot of reading- I read to the boys and Superman reads his share.

                            

  For math I introduced some telling time.  Hours, half hours and minutes.  We reviewed number placement on a number line.  And of course the norm of addition/subtraction drill.  I also tossed in a page of word problems.

 

 

  I don't have a photo of our complete science week, but we went over flowers and some types of flowers.  Our experiment was to see how water travels through the stem.  We placed four white Carnations in four glasses of dyed water.  After a few days, the flowers in the blue dye looked like this.  They and the red ones are now quite pretty and colorful.  There will be a follow up photo at the end of this week.

Homeschool catch up & family

  Whew, I need to catch up.  I was pretty much off the pc for awhile.  We had some family in for a few weeks last month.  Our cousin brought her mom down with her, so that was a huge surprise.  It was very nice to see them.
   Then some of my in-laws came for a visit.  They rented a beach house near us.  In all, it was a lot less stressful than I thought it would be.  Both women are former teachers, though one was an elementary teacher.  When they visited last summer, they were very against home school.  I'm sure they still are.  But, after looking at our Phonics Road, math and some of the things we have gone over, as well as just observation, the former elem teacher, was impressed.  She mentioned that what we are doing is good for right now.  We talked briefly about what we would do with our little guy if we had to place him in school.  Would he be bored?  How far ahead would he be?  Things like that.  And, my husband is coming around a little more.  He said we would continue with home school for now, though he'd have questions later on.  I am happy, but sad because it is causing friction between him and his folks.
  Anyhow, on to my review.  Last was week 16, and if you count the weeks, you'll see we took a small break.  I think I took 2 weeks to cover one of those weeks, and then with family here...But, that's the great thing about home school.  We can go at our own pace.  And considering we are technically kindergarten....

Home school co op starts

  We had a light week for schooling.  Both kids had colds, but the nice thing about home school, is that we are home!  No missed work.  No make up assignments.  No absent marks.  And though ill enough to have been taken out of school, the little guy was well enough to do some work.
  We started our comprehension stories from Phonics Road.  It was, "The little red hen".  He had to read the page, then illustrated what he read.  By Friday, he had his own five page, illustrated book.  It's a nice way to see if the kids understand what they are reading.  He'll be doing a weekly book now until the end of the school year. Along with the comprehension, there are still new spelling words for the week, and review of spelling rules, along with some other new things like compound words-which we will be doing next week.
   We did a little math review of addition and subtraction this week.
 Thursday was the first day of our local home school co op classes!  The kids were well enough to go, and I figured we could leave if they started to feel sick.  Wow!  So many families were at the co op.  And we didn't even see half of them, since they were taking other classes.  We singed up for four classes-math bootcamp, science, music and art.  Everything went well.  Both the science and art classes are very cool.  The science teacher had a bunch of neat animals for the kids to see and learn about.  In the art class they did wet on wet painting.
   In all, the day went pretty well.  The sun came out and started to dry off the play ground, which was good, since I was going in and out of the classes with my youngest.  I'll be better prepared for him next week, on things to do.

  Now of course, the cold in my youngest has progressed to a nice wet cough.  The eldest still has a slight dry cough, but since my youngest had a very odd cough back in December for 2 weeks, I figure some of the cilia in his lungs was probably effected, hence he is showing more coughing symptoms than his brother.  All is good though.  I'm mainly using high dose Sodium Ascorbate (Vitamin C), along with Borion's cough syrup and cold calm.
 
 

Our weekly home school wrap up

  It was a good week.  I thought I'd share some photos of things we are doing.  If you check my home school page, it goes over a month in review, and some of the programs we are using.  As you know, we are using The Phonics Road to Spelling and Reading.  It's a fantastic program.  I really can't say enough about it.  We just wrapped up week 14.  We review daily the last 15 or so phonograms.  This past week we did sentence structure, how one starts and ends.  Here is a picture of some of my guys sentences.  Pretty good writing, I think, for an almost six year old.  These were done by dictation, and the only thing I had to explain in detail were the punctuation marks.

   For math, we are using Singapore 1.  We finished up the first half, and will be starting the second half shortly.  Until I get the workbook, we've been reviewing basic addition and doing flashcard work.  The photo shows the Singapore workbook for 1A, Spiderman, and in the binder, some of Math Mammoth, that we also use, for extra practice.

Singapore-creating math sentences. 

    For science we are using Elemental Science.  So far, I find it a nice program for elementary.  We are doing the, Biology part right now.  That covers animals for 20 weeks, body for 10 weeks and plants for 6 weeks.  the only problem I've had is the basic spine.  So we use various animal books.  This week we learned about whales, dolphins and walrus.  We also use some Planet Earth books and stickers.  We find the habitat of the animal, and then place it in the book and also on a wall map.  This way, it also incorporates some geography.

We covered a little mapping this week, which we'll continue into next week.  I found a few nice books at the library to use as a review of the United States.  Because Galloping the Globe includes some animals that live on each continent, we can combine our science and history, when it comes to animals.  By accident, after finding the Nat Geo book, I found a Toot and Puddle series.  One of the pigs is adventurous, and travels to different countries.  They make a nice story, and we can pull a lesson or project out of the book too.

Lastly, we finally started reading some Bible stories.  I have not been able to find a children's bible that wasn't too detailed, or sided more on one religion.  So far, the one I found seems to be working.  We read one or two stories at bed time.  Also, out of all the many, many books we check out from the library, we finally read, "Ferdinand".  

Until next week...