Weekly Report: 1/11/10-1/15/10

School officially started this week! So excited to get into the swing; our days certainly go better when we’re consistently scheduled and learning. Long hours of free time are a recipe for fighting. This week took some effort getting back into the swing of things. It will take some more, but even by Wednesday things went more smoothly than they had on Monday.

Memory Work: Obviously at the beginning of the year, we’re doing very, very easy, quick work. It will get more difficult through the year, but we’re establishing routine now.

Bible: We’re working on the Creation Story from Gen 1 this year. There are other plans for the rest of the year, but we’re going to focus here for a long time.

Catechism/Creed: We’re working on The Apostle’s Creed and Catechism for Young Children. Each of the children are in different places of the Catechism of course.

Hymn: The Doxology and reviewing Holy, Holy, Holy. The children know both of these pretty well, but I wanted to start with something familiar and we’ll add new hymns in coming months.

Manner: I’m reading a page a day from Polite Moments. I’ll probably have M-girl read some of these during our Circle Time.

Poetry: We’re reviewing and working on The Yak.

Counting: Can everyone count from 1-100? Let’s count!

Other Memory Work: What’s your whole name? M-girl and N-boy know this, but R-girl needs to be able to answer this quickly with her middle name.

Phonics:

M-girl: OPGTR Lessons 71-74, ETC-C Lesson “g”, CLP Nature Reader “Crocodile”. M-girl can read approximately anything, but we are finishing OPG & ETC to make certain we have that firm foundation.

N-boy: OPGTR Lessons 27-29, ETC-A Lesson “k”. N-boy is starting to read; he’s sounding out CVC words very excitedly.

R-girl: Letter puzzles, letter magnets. She knows most of them pretty well, but we’ll keep at it. After conference, she’ll start ETC.

Math:

M-girl: We started back in on Ray’s Lesson 5. Just make certain she immediately recognizes her numbers. MEP Lesson 8 went well, and may have been M-girl’s favorite lesson of the week. She worked on identifying and creating sets and “more than” and “less than” statements.

N-boy: N-boy worked on Ray’s Lesson 1 all three days this week. He basically understands 1 to 1 correspondence and number recognition.

R-girl: We established the fact that she can count to 10 – Hooray!; unfortunately, she doesn’t recognize her numbers – Boo! We have some work to do here.

Grammar:

M-girl: continues in FLL to work on her study of nouns: proper and common. She is also working on two poems: “The Caterpillar” and “Work.”

Penmanship: Not started yet.

Geography: We began our study on Central America and the Carribean. We did some map work. We also talked a good deal about the earthquake in Haiti this week.

Spanish: Not started yet.

Science: We talked about God creating all things from nothing and that it was formless. There will be some pictures of this later today 🙂 Or maybe not, this was a complete failure, will have to try again some other time …

Art:

Artistic Pursuits, Lesson 1 … the process with glitter puffy paints:

This afternoon, we’ll be doing bird seed pine cones; I’ll add pictures of this later, too 🙂