Kindergarten Week in Review #19
We had a really fun week doing school this past week…here’s what we’ve been up to:
Bible: Last week I mentioned that I missed some of the other Bible materials we read last semester since we have been focusing on the take home lessons from 252 basics this semester. Well, I “got my wish” this week. I stayed home from church with the boys a week ago Sunday since Erik was sick…and the 252 basics take home lessons never made it into my hands. So, we read a couple chapters from “Leading Little Ones to God” and we did some lessons out of “My See, Point, and Learn Bible book“. This book is more on Erik’s level, but Madeline enjoys it too…so it is fun to do with them together.
Math: We worked on lessons 13-16 in RightStart Math this week. Besides practicing abacus skills, the main new concept we practiced was even and odd numbers. While i had briefly mentioned this concept before, it was really fairly new to Madeline. We used math tiles and “dot cards” to help visualize whether each number between one and ten was even or odd:
Madeline also really enjoyed the games in this week’s lesson, including dot card memory, a “comes after” game that was similar to “war”, and dot card bingo.
Reading/Phonics: We continued using Explode the Code (ETC) books 1.5 and 2 this week. I am still really happy with my choice on these books. Since starting the explode the code books we covered double letter word endings (words that end in combos like -dd, -ss, and so on) and we’ve started covering some two letter beginning blends. I’ve also been trying to find simple “easy reader” books from the library for Madeline to read. She still needs some help here and there, but I can definitely see improvement in her abilities. Here she is hard at work on one of her ETC pages:
Geography: We completed our study of India this week. We did all of our planned reading (I linked to the titles in last week’s wrap up post) on Monday, then worked on our lapbook on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Madeline and I decided to do a double lapbook to cover the continent of Asia — with one folder each for China and India. We got the India section of the lapbook about 95% finished. We just need to add some pictures of the animals we learned about from India (elephants, tigers, monkeys, etc) and a picture for the title flap. I didn’t take pictures yet — I’ll post pictures of the whole thing once we do the China section.
Science: We finally started “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding” (BFSU)! I seriously considered skipping lesson A/B-1, since the topic of organizing and classifying sounded so basic. But, upon further reflection, I thought that it would be a good subject to discuss and be able to refer back to in the future. Both Madeline and Erik really enjoyed an “observation skills” activity that demonstrated how it was easier to remember the contents of a tray filled with objects when the contents were sorted into various categories, versus when they were scattered on the tray randomly.
We also started discussing lesson A-2, which is on the states of matter (solid, liquid and gas). This is a review for Madeline to some extent because we covered this topic last fall. We’ll do a little bit more with lesson A-2 this coming week and possibly start lesson A-3 (on the topic of Air) as well. Once we get past lesson A-3 I think we will try out the weekly schedule rotation I wrote about in my post introducing BFSU.
“Game Day”: Since we had neither a field trip or our co-op this week, I planned a “game day” for us on Friday. We worked on educational games like those in our math curriculum and some sight word games, and we played a couple of board games from our game cabinet. I also gave Madeline and Erik each a chance to make up their own game. Erik’s game was called crown soccer and involved playing soccer in the playroom and living room with a tiny soft soccer ball:
And Madeline’s game involved some homemade paper dolls playing soccer:
“Game Day” was super fun and I think it’s something we will do again in the future!










