Weekly Report 9/8-9/11 : France

Week 3: France

Galloping the Globe

We spent a wonderful week in France and Miriam now wants to know when we get to go live there! We had a short week this week due to leaving for a long weekend at the lake tonight and a doctors appointment and library trip we had on Wednesday. I have another craft for France and a cooking activity that we are planning to do while on vacation.

Art

We learned about French artists, Degas and Monet, this week instead of doing our normal Come Look with Me picture study.

On Monday we read two fictional books about the artist Edgar Degas and looked at his painting The Rehearsal on the Stage and his sculpture The Little Dancer. We discussed Degas' desire to show movement in his art and then we tried to show movement in our own artwork by making "a resist in motion." We traced a stencil several times moving it only slightly each time, then colored it with crayon and painted over it with watered down paint. Miriam is now requesting to do art every day; it was fun, I even tried! Rebekah's picture is on top, Miriam's to the left and mine to the right.On Thursday we "read" Linnea in Monet's Garden - it was another book that was a bit over Miriam's head, so we mostly just talked about Monet and the paintings shown in the book. The the kids tried to paint like an impressionist. Here is Miriam painting her own poppy field; she also painted a sun setting behind trees on another paper. Rebekah made a rainbow. Michael just had fun spreading water all over his pages.

Reading

Miriam completed lessons 8-10 in ETC 1 this week; she should finish this book next week! She also did two lessons in The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading; learning words ending in lk, lb, lp, st, and nt. She still needs practice on the "nt" words, hopefully we'll do some of that while on vacation as well (since she's asking if we can take our school books with us)

Math

Miriam finished up her unit on measuring this week by finishing lesson 9 in Singapore Earlybird 2a. The picture above is of her measuring the window using a cutout of her hand. She also measured in her own "feet" and in her own "paces." We also measured using our "learning links"; even Rebekah loved that activity! We spent the rest of our math time this week doing all kinds of fun measuring worksheets I had from teaching in public school and measuring anything and everything in the house.

Science

This week we began our four week unit studying matter. I am so excited about this unit, as there are so many age appropriate experiments that we will be doing to really get a grasp on the differences between a solid, liquid, and gas. We read the section about matter in The Berenstain Bears' Big Book of Science and Nature. Then we played a game to demonstrate how molecules move and look in the states of matter; I caught the girls playing this game many times this week! Miriam also watched a pieces of ice melt on the stove and change from solid to liquid and then to gas.

Bible

This week we finished up talking about Abraham, then we learned about Issac and Rebekah and Jacob and Esau.

Preschool

Rebekah enjoyed joining us this week for many of the fun activities we did in all our subjects. When Miriam was working at the table she had fun using the following books we picked up at the teacher store last weekend and her Kumon pasting book. She was so excited to get a book full of her favorite work: cutting and pasting activities!