Weekly Report: 1/25/10-1/29/10

We had a nice week. We’re getting into a groove where the whole getting started isn’t as hard as 2 weeks ago.  The potty training experiment failed on Wednesday I put diapers back on R-girl.  Jason had to work long hours this week and it was a difficult week to chose.  We’ll try again next week.  

Memory Work:

Bible: added Genesis 1:3

Poetry:finished The Yak.  M-girl was reciting in the van on Thursday, and I could tell that the meter finally clicked and she found she knew what came next  by how the words sounded.  That was super cool.

Phonics:

M-girl: Read and narrated the Elephant page in the CLP K Reader.  She also did some work in ETC and OPGTR.

N-boy: N-boy finished ETC-A! Hooray! He reached a milestone, so I gave him a sticker *and* stickers to give to his sisters … “Rejoice with me!”  He’s slowly working on short “E” words in OPG.  Fun stuff!

R-girl: Still doing letter recognition activities: alphabet puzzles and books.

Math:

M-girl: We continue to work on “making” up to 10s with counters and other manipulatives.   I love this and am frustrated by this about Ray’s.  I think a couple more days and we’ll assess to going on to the next set of lessons.  MEP pages continue to be a hit.

N-boy: We are working on number recognition from 11-100.  He can do the counting, but needs to have that instant recognition.  We do many things toward this goal, so I know he’ll get there soon.

R-girl: We made the “2” page in her number book and read number books.

Grammar:

M-girl: I am really loving FLL.  M-girl is learning in detail all about nouns and she absolutely loves Story Narration.  I allow her to do a CM-style “tell me everything you remember” narration then a WTM-style
“tell me the most important parts/summarize” style narration.  Right now, that seems to be the best way.

Penmanship: We started Cursive First with numbers! 0, 6, 8.  I’m so glad we spent 2 weeks talking about the clock face tool and the house tool.  It gives us a vocabulary to talk about the lines and to practice.  The kids like it too.  So far, I’ve been having them practice on a white board.  I’m thinking I’ll introduce the step on white board, then move to paper. 

Geography:We studied Panama this week.  We colored maps and drew the canal onto them.  We watched YouTube videos about going through the canal (I really liked this time lapse video and these two animated videos of how ships go through the locks.  My parents have been through the canal on a cruise (which stopped in several other Central American countries), so they shared their photos from the trip. I asked at Whole Foods if they had any unroasted coffee beans from Central America, and they gave me a few.  Oh! And we tried Fried Plantains and all agreed that they weren’t very yummy, but they may have been underripe. For our meal we all liked Avocado Soup and disliked Ropa Vieja.

Spanish: Not started yet, but soon!

Science: No science this week other than tracking the weather on our breakfast board.

Art: We painted with roller paints on Monday.  Thanks, Aunt J!