Week 21

Week 21

Life in the Woods

This was our last week studying the woods. We've learned quite a lot about the woods and really enjoyed this portion of our study. The highlight of this week was learning about animals that use bubble nests to hide and protect their eggs. We had such a fun time making our own bubble nests with straws, water and dish soap.
The children cannot wait to move on to studying the polar regions next week thanks to our new read aloud, Mr. Popper's Penguins. This is the first book that we've all loved in the entire curriculum. Even Michael sat to listen to chapter after chapter this afternoon. There is no way we're going to be able to read only one chapter a day for the next several weeks; I'm likely going to have to find yet another read aloud on my own to take up the extra weeks if we finish this book early. It is somewhat discouraging that at week 21 of our school year we've only liked half of the book choices and I've had to replace the other half. In looking at the future book choices for the last 15 weeks of school it looks like I will be replacing at least one more of the read alouds due to content. I was looking forward to using the Winterpromise curriculum studying American history, but I am really rethinking that after my struggle with read alouds during this program. Back to planning square one for next year I guess.

Language Arts

Miriam is continuing to read The Cobble Street Cousins series. She finished Special Gifts this week and also began chapter 1 of book #4, Some Good News. Miriam finished lesson 7 in Explode the Code 6, step 12 in All About Spelling 2, and lesson 66 in Growing with Grammar. She also wrote and illustrated her own newspaper just like The Cobble Street Cousins do in their book.
I had a bad teacher epiphany while teaching Rebekah this week. She began reading so well and with such determination months ago. However in the last few weeks she's struggled day after day to do a few exercises or one page in her Explode the Code 1 book. It's as if she hit a wall and was no longer retaining information. I however, continued to push her through her workbook (all the way to lesson 7!) requiring her to get through the work each day and getting frustrated with her when she struggled to sound out the sentences or forgot words she'd just sounded out. It dawned on me this Monday that I was pushing a 4 year old to do Kindergarten level work when her ability and interest were no longer at that level. Talk about feeling horrible. To make matters worse when I closed the book on Monday morning and told Rebekah that we were going to put it away and not work on it anymore since it had become too difficult the poor child broke down into tears of relief. She'd been working so hard trying to please me and I'd just ignored the signs that she was no longer enjoying her work and was not ready for the material. I almost made my child hate school before she was even in Kindergarten!!! Thank goodness children have such short memories and are so easy to give forgiveness; she was loving school again by Tuesday when I remembered that I homeschool to make learning FUN and on the right level for my children!
For the rest of the week Rebekah spent her language arts time doing preschool level worksheets (same/different, little/big, etc) and playing with simple letter combinations on the white board using the All About Spelling tiles. She also read me the first 4 Bob books (again) and was so proud of herself. She finished the section on capital letters in the Handwriting Without Tears K workbook.

Math

Miriam finished through lesson 65 in RightStart B. She still needs practice on adding with 9s. She really enjoyed playing the corners game and using the geoboard this week. She also finished through Chapter 8 in her Bob Jones 1st Grade book; all that material is still easy review for her.
Rebekah continues to love her Bob Jones K book. She finished though chapter 7 this week. I was amazed that she already knew how to tell time to the hour just from watching me teach Miriam about time long ago!

Bible

We finished though chapter 12 in our Bible curriculum and learned about many of Jesus's miracles.