Nine weeks down…if we do a traditional 36 week year that’s one quarter! Wow! Not sure exactly how long our “school year” will, but it has flown by so fast and I can’t believe that it may be 25% done! With the time change this past Sunday we moved our whole family’s schedule by one hour instead of “gaining” an hour. We felt like everyone was staying up too late and it was hard to get a good start on the day. So, the kids bed time is now 8 or 8:30pm instead of 9 or 9:30pm, and Tony and I have the goal of getting to bed at 11pm instead of midnight. It’s working great so far and we have even started school before 9am a couple days!!! That never happened on our old schedule, because some days the kids didn’t even wake up until 8:30am!
Here’s what we did this week:
Bible/Character: We talked about “Faithfulness” for our Fruit of the Spirit study, and read 3 chapters from “Leading Little Ones to God”
Math: We worked on telling time this week. First we read “Me Counting Time.“ We had worked on telling time to the hour last year, so we reviewed that first. I decided to begin with a dollar store workbook I bought this summer on telling time to the hour and half hour. It looked like it would be a lot more fun than the really plain pages in her Kindermath workbook. Review of time to the hour went great — Madeline still had a good memory of this even though it has been at least four or five months since we last touched on it.
Telling time to the half hour went okay when all we did was times to the half hour, but once we mixed “hour” and “half hour” times on the same page confusion ensued. Madeline tried using her little (non-geared) practice clock, but it was hard to get the hands pointing in exactly the right place. She would also randomly moved the hands around and ask “what time does this say?” The problem with this being that since the hands on the clock move independently, many of the “times” she showed me didn’t really exist because the hour hand was not in proper position compared to the minute hand. I then realized why so many math curriculums come with a geared clock. We went to pick one up at Lakeshore Learning this weekend and I am hoping that will make our time telling lessons go more smoothly in the future!
Reading/Phonics: We studied the -ag family in Alphabet Island this week. I’m still really encouraged by Madeline’s ability to sound out the initial sound + word family to make a word. When we are doing mixed groups of words from multiple word families she still gets things a bit confused sometime, but her progress is noticeable from when we first started learning the word families.
Handwriting: We combined Alphabet Island and Writing on a couple of days as Madeline wrote out her Alphabet Island words and did a capital letters review page. She also did another page in “Draw Write Now“:
(Red pen and no lines on the paper is her choice, not mine! I tried to get her to do it the “normal” way with pencil and lines in the writing area of the paper…but somehow she wasn’t excited about doing it that way! For now, I am just happy she wants to write whole sentences!)
History: We continued on the theme of Explorers by reading a biography of Christopher Columbus by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire. I absolutely love their historical non-fiction for children. I had hoped to read Leif the Lucky by the same authors this week as well, but we didn’t get to it.
Science: Our science topic this week was fish and sea creatures. We read the related material in our science text book, Madeline colored and labeled the parts of a fish, and we read a book about fish that live in coral reefs. We also had co-op this week, and the topic there was fish and sea creatures as well.
Read-alouds: We are still on hiatus from Dr. Doolittle. Instead we read the first “Mrs. Piggle Wiggle” book, and read about half of another in that series. And of course we read some of those nice fluffy fairy books as well that Madeline loves so much!
Fun Stuff: Madeline did some water color painting this week, as well as some self-selected craft projects…like making a decorative paper color for one of her current-favorite stuffed animals “pets”. Other stuff I put in the fun boxes this week was mostly ignored in favor of extra play time or Madeline taking her own turns with Erik’s Tot School stuff. That’s okay too!
We didn’t have a field trip this week since it was co-op week, but the kids did enjoy a trip to the McDonald’s Playland as a treat for making it through their immunizations at the doctor’s office, and went to the Children’s museum on Friday night with Tony while I went to a Ladies Night at church!
Coming Soon: This next week will feature only two “normal” school days. We’ll be taking a field trip to a museum in St. Cloud, and then Madeline will spend a couple days with Grandma Karen. She’ll still do a little bit of school while she is at Grandma’s house, but I am sure they will be having lots of non-school fun too. Starting November 16th, we’ll be doing a Thanksgiving mini-unit-study. I’m excited to read about pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving with Madeline.
