Weekly Report - Year 3 Week 9

We had a normal week with the normal few interruptions. :) We had a great visit with my parents Tuesday, so no school that day. Then Wednesday we did a special lunch out, followed by haircuts and grocery shopping. Then Thursday, The Brute started up speech therapy again, and we hit the playground afterwards. Somehow, we still finished things by 2pm that day. Strange!

Next week, we're technically supposed to be on break for 3 weeks (taking a trip soon), BUT... I'll probably still do a few days of school and just take the last couple days of the week off to prepare for our trip - doing any last minute shopping, etc. We'll see. With it still being pretty warm, I'm thinking it'd be better to save our "week off" for a nice, fall day.

Tornado Boy

Math: We dove into word problems this week, which involved bar diagrams and also a chance to introduce some basic algebra (for problems where they expected "guess and check"). At one point, I was explaining some algebra concept that Tornado Boy was completely not understanding, so I reworded it and went over it again... and again... and again... Finally, he sort of understood. :) Then when doing the word problems in his exercise, lo and behold, he actually used similar algebra for one of the problems! Woohoo! He's sort of on the cusp of understanding this stuff - sort of there, sort of not. The funny part was that he was trying to use T-T to represent "tank tops" and T-S to represent "T-shirts", and he had set up his equation properly, but it looked like you were subtracting T from T and S from T. :) So I suggested calling them 't' and 's'. He was then able to easily solve the problem without confusion. He also did a problem with a complicated bar diagram on his own. Some problems are easier with algebra and some are easier with bar diagrams.

Reading: He finished Pocahantas and the Strangers this week. He is also still working on Lord of the Rings 2.

Grammar: We focused on adjectives and adverbs this week.

Writing: He wrote a paragraph on George Washington. It was a bit awkward, but he met the assignment. The awkwardness came in because he forgot to put in his "who/which" and "because" clauses before writing the rough draft.

Spelling: He finished review week 24, getting a 100 on his test.

Handwriting: Didn't do anything this week.

Latin: We finished lessons 31-33 in GWSL. We now know how to do first, second, and third person singular and plural verb forms.

Vocab: We discussed the stem "sub" this week.

Poetry: We talked about onomatopoeia and personification this week.

Read-Aloud: We have continued with Chomp. It's more interesting after the first chapter. :)

Bible: Still doing life of Jesus. He has called his apostles and done some more miracles. We also continued with our daily Proverbs study.

History: This week, we learned about the Mayans, noting some things we read in The Corn Grows Ripe earlier in our studies (seems like that book should have coincided with the Mayan section of Incans, Aztecs, and Mayans).

Science: Still reading chemistry books and also some dinosaur books.

The Brute

Math: We worked on order and position this week, finishing up that unit. We have started the first review. There are two more reviews after this one. We are still waiting on our Life of Fred Butterflies order to come in so we can start that up! We missed Fred Friday, after finishing the book Thursday. :)

Reading: We completed another page of Dancing Bears and also started reading "The Little Red Hen" in the Free & Treadwell Primer. He did VERY well reading that! We completed the story. We also read a little bit in McGuffey's Primer.

Handwriting:We worked on the letter 'u' this week and wrote some words and his name.

Other: We finished week 7 of Sonlight P4/5.

Mischief

Mischief worked through some random preschool type workbooks I got from a friend. We also built staircases with C-rods. :)

Weekly Report - Year 3 Week 8

This week, we had 100% of our normal school subjects going. We also had our homeschool support group's "kickoff" on Saturday. Tornado Boy won highest number of pages read for summer reading (13,122 pages) across all age groups. The Brute got 3rd place in his age group, and Mischief got 1st place in his age group. The theme for kickoff was a county fair type deal, and the kids entered the Pet Photo Contest (instead of bringing live animals ;) ). Mischief got Honorable Mention (basically, 4th place). I think that was pretty good, considering he's 3. I liked Final's tail in the picture. :)

Tornado Boy

Math: Tornado Boy finished the order of operations sections and moved into mental math calculations. He also passed the Life of Fred Fractions bridge to chapter 16 on the first try! He then did chapters 16-19.

Reading: He started Pocahontas and the Strangers, by Clyde Bulla.

Grammar: We reviewed adjectives and adverbs this week.

Writing: Tornado Boy wrote a paragraph on the Mongols this week, and while we were discussing it, he proceeded to tell me all kinds of details about the Mongols that he had learned in SOTW. :) In fact, he remembered that they were nomads, so when one of his keywords was "people", he replaced that with "nomads" in his actual paragraph. His requirements were at least one each of an "-ly adverb", "who/which clause", and a "strong verb". He also was not allowed to use the words go/went, say/said, or see/saw. The banned words weren't difficult in this paragraph though. I don't think he had any of those words in his initial thoughts.

Spelling: He finished week 23 of R&S. We had some interruptions, so he didn't have his normal study days and was concerned about that, but I said, "Let's try the test anyway. If you miss some words, we'll practice them and test again next week." Well, he ended up getting a 100 on the test. He knew more than he thought he did, despite having some tricky "-air", "-are", "-ear" spellings to remember. :)

Handwriting: Didn't do anything this week.

Latin: New subject! We've actually been doing this subject all along this year, but I kept forgetting to add it to the list of subjects in my weekly reports! Doh! We are loving Getting Started With Latin (GSWL), and finished though Lesson 30 this week. We know how to say things like, "Y'all ain't farmers!" in Latin now. Very useful stuff! This is Tornado Boy's favorite subject right now. It definitely works the brain!

Vocab: This is another subject I keep forgetting to add to the weekly report. We are doing MCT's Building Languages, and Tornado Boy really loved the first part talking about the Roman architecture. We have now done the first stem lesson on "re".

Poetry: And yet another subject I forgot to add... MCT's Music of the Hemispheres is going very well. We've been discussing soft and hard sounds in poetry so far.

Read-Aloud: We finished The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom (excellent book!) and now have started Chomp, though we've only read one chapter and I can't say whether we'll like it or not yet.

Bible: We've been continuing studying the life of Jesus, harmonizing the gospels. Jesus has just started his ministry. We also studied Proverbs daily and have picked out a verse to focus on in our family.

History: We finished reading about the Aztecs and also learned about the Incans. Tornado Boy liked the Aztecs a lot. The Incans were a bit boring comparatively, but they had their interesting points. We also finished Secret of the Andes. We thought it would never end! It's not a horrible book... it's just that nothing actually happens! In the last chapter, we did learn what the "secret" was and some details about why Cusi (the young boy in the story) was with this older man (Chuto) on a mountain with a bunch of llamas. It's just that the road to get there was a bit of a slog. At one point, I was reading about him going down a trail with these great descriptions of the trail, and I stopped and said, "I keep expecting orcs to jump out and eat him." Tornado Boy laughed. We've been reading Lord of the Rings, each of us reading it on our own. We finished The Hobbit and LOTR1 and watched the LOTR1 movie (Tornado Boy liked it). We're both about halfway through the LOTR2 book. He's ahead of me, despite starting after me. Sigh.

Science: Tornado Boy continued to study some chemistry books we got from the library.

The Brute

Math: We finished subtraction! He is pretty good with addition and subtraction facts. They're not 100% solid, but he can usually think of them reasonably quickly. We also are just a few chapters from finishing Life of Fred Apples. We certainly know sums of 7 now. :) He is learning what a "set" is, and he has solidified his days of the week and reading time to the hour. I went ahead and ordered Butterflies and Cats (along with Decimals/Percents for Tornado Boy).

Reading: We finished a page of Dancing Bears. Things are going well.

Handwriting: We got through the letter 't' and wrote some words as well.

Other: We finished Sonlight P4/5 week 6. We also started a concentrated effort to learn how to color properly, using R&S's Bible Pictures to Color book. We're coloring a little bit at a time. I think learning to color will help make handwriting easier. ;)

Mischief

My mind is drawing a blank on what Mischief did this week, besides wreaking havoc of course! We dropped MEP Math, as he was getting a bit bored with it. The parts that were easy were too repetitive, and the parts that were hard were, well... hard. And he's not ready for hard. :) I've ordered R&S Adventures with Books and Counting with Numbers for him, and I think those will be a good fit.

Here is a good example of the mischief he did... taking a marker to Dancing Bears, when I was only using light pencil in the book so I could resell it later... sigh.

Nice letters for a 3 year old :)

Weekly Report - Year 3 Weeks 6-7

I never got around to updating last week, so I'm doing a combined post this week. :)

Tornado Boy

Math: We've finished the first unit of 5A and done the first review. I don't think there was really anything "new" to him in this unit. We also worked through all of the challenging section of CWP 4 Unit 1. I think we've already done those in Unit 2, so we'll skip to Unit 3 next week, just doing the challenge section. He did a few chapters of Life of Fred Fractions as well.

One day, while he was supposed to be doing a practice page dealing with factorization, I found him doing his for fun:

Finding all prime numbers within 100

Reading: Nothing assigned. I think next week he'll have something from Sonlight.

Grammar: We finished KISS Level 1.2 (Adding Complements). We did a few R&S exercises last week, but didn't plan any for this week.

Writing: Last week, he did "The Donkey and His Driver". This week, he did "Peter the Great". He has absolutely no problem adding a who/which clause. That has become "easy". He usually has no problem adding an -ly adverb, but this week, the material didn't lend itself to obvious usage, so I had to help him a bit. No problem avoiding banned words this week. Last week, he did very well replacing the banned word "said" with "remarked", and that doubled as a strong verb. :)

Spelling: We finished weeks 21 and 22 of R&S Spelling 3.

Handwriting: For grins, I wrote down the cursive alphabet on a white board and had Tornado Boy copy it (note that he has not been taught how to write cursive yet). I was rather shocked by the results! Mischief erased part of it, but you can see some of it still:

Read-Aloud: Still reading The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom. We're nearing the end. The Princes Charming have now found Ella ("Cinderella") and are trying to stop the evil witch Zaubera from her plan to take over some kingdoms by killing everyone.

Bible: We started the daily Bible reading that my church elders have put together to study the Life of Christ, harmonizing the Gospels. So far, we're keeping up! ;) We also continuing our daily Proverbs study. Each day, we have found verses that were applicable to situations in our lives.

History: We started Week 5 of Sonlight this week, and have read about the Aztecs. The gross parts were the most interesting to Tornado Boy, of course!

Science: He has been reading a bit about chemistry and also doing some nature study. We did find a weed in the backyard that we cannot identify. I've seen it a lot over the years and know it's common around here, but I can't find it online. If anyone knows what it is, let me know!!! We're in Alabama, btw.

Identify me please!!! :)

The Brute

Math: We picked up Life of Fred Apples for $5 locally last week, so we've been reading a chapter each day usually. The Brute LOVES it! He does very well with the questions, and he likes the "zero game" and even taught it to the eye doctor yesterday. We also continued through Singapore 1A unit 4, chapter 2, learning various methods of subtraction. It's still pretty easy at this point, but that's ok. It's good to give him confidence in a subject like this!

We also built some towers, a la Education Unboxed. What impressed me was that as he was covering the 100 flat with 5-rods, he said, "I'll need 20 5-rods!" Multiplication! I haven't taught him that yet.

And this tower has a electricity/sewer system around it:

Reading: He passed the first Mastery Test in Dancing Bears. Yay! We have begun the next section and are progessing nicely.

Handwriting: We learned 'm' and 'n', which are VERY difficult for him to write (and those are the letters that confused him in speech AND they are letters he gets confused in reading... they are his nemesis!!!). We also did the letter 't'. I had him copy a word that I wrote - "ham", then he had me copy a word he wrote - "cat". :)

Other: We finished Sonlight P4/5 Weeks 4 and 5. Still enjoying it! It really helps to keep it all in one tote bag, so I just grab the bag and sit on the couch to read for a while!

Mischief

We did some rod play from Education Unboxed:

 

We also practiced phonograms from Dancing Bears and read through the first part of the book. He's pretty good at sounding out words and blending.

He did a little bit of handwriting on his own:

He also studied the paranormal a bit...

Weekly Report - Year 3 Week 5

We had a great week, even though we didn't do everything on the schedule. The first 3 days were as scheduled, and then the next day we had a rocketry day at a friend's house - all day rocketry projects! Such fun! Then we recovered on Friday. :P

Tornado Boy

Math: We finished 4B! He got an 80% on the placement test, which is the minimum for moving on. I know that sounds low, but I have tried to get him to a place where he has to work for 80%, so this is GOOD! ;) Most of the problems missed were silly errors anyway. His concepts are solid. We will start 5A on Monday (and work through CWP 4). Of course, I always have him correct missed problems on tests and such, so that 80% will become 100%. ;)

Reading: Nothing specific, but he read lots of library books and such.

Grammar: We did a quick review of complements and a couple lessons in R&S 4 on combining sentences and such.

Writing: He rewrote "The Cocks and the Eagle", including his -ly adverb and who/which clause. That completes lesson 3 (of 15).

Spelling: He did the workbook exercises for Lesson 21. We will do the test Monday. We were supposed to do it Wednesday, but he didn't feel ready. I had him practice the words instead - writing them with his finger on the couch, spelling them out loud, etc. He thinks so much like me... His way of remembering "thousand" is "thou sand". :)

Read-Aloud: Continued The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom. Currently, the 4 Prince Charmings have just escaped from the Bandit King.

Bible: Continued reading through Romans and Proverbs.

History: None officially (though he's been reading books about the Revolutionary War, and he and Mischief played "Minutemen vs. the British", where Mischief literally marched around with a hockey stick on his shoulder like a rifle - hilarious).

Science: Various science books around the house, and of course the big Rocketry Day! A friend did a subscription to Aurora Lipper's summer e-science stuff, and she decided to do a bunch of the projects all in one day with several boys invited over to join in. It was supposed to go from 9-1:30, but it ended up 9-4! We had a great day though.

And from last week, pics of our nature study subject...

 

The Brute

Math: We started subtraction. The number stories get pretty silly. One day, he did a number story that went on and on and on and on and on. He really puts the "story" into number stories! Another day, there were 4 frogs on a lilypad and one more jumping off. So his story was, "There are 5 frogs. One turned into a shark and ate the other frogs." I asked how many frogs were eaten, and he said, "4!" :)

Reading: We're on the last drill page before the first Mastery Test. I imagine it will take us all week to finish it.

Handwriting: We did 'k' and 'l' this week. Kind of slacked off the last 3 days. :/

The 'k' in the middle is his... and he demanded checks. :)

Other: We finished week 3 of Sonlight P4/5. We're a little behind on the DEL workbooks, but that's ok. We did several pages this weekend. Clearly, I need to teach my kids to color...

Mischief

He has continued with MEP Reception. We've done 6 or 7 lessons now. One lesson had him tear brown paper to make a bear. We did that (with my help), and The Brute came over and decided to make the bear a girl (top half)... I then added a dress to the bear. :P

Weekly Report - Year 3 Week 4

This was a short week for Tornado Boy, since DH took him on a "field trip" to DC Thursday-Saturday. He got everything done that was planned though, and even finished before lunch the last two days (the first day he finished around dinner time after threat of not getting pancakes for dinner, so he worked much more diligently the next two days). The Brute and Mischief got to continue their normal school week, which of course took very little time.

On the plane, ready to fly...

Tornado Boy

Math: We finished the 4B lessons and just have the last review and the 4B placement test (which I use as an end of book test). We learned about volume this week, including 1mL=1cm^3, and he got to figure out that a m^3=1,000,000cm^3.

Reading: He finished Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. I'm still not even halfway through the book. Oh well. He's taken the second book on his trip to DC, along with some other books. He also officially well surpassed his 10,000 page summer reading goal! and I haven't even entered everything. I think he's really closer to 12,000 pages now.

Grammar: We had an early introduction to verbals this week. Those sentences got a bit tricky!

Writing: I only had him write the final copy of his "Zombie and the Nuts" story. The rest of the week was a reprieve, since he was going out of town. Next week, we'll continue on with the next story. :)

Spelling: He did week 19 and only missed one word on the spelling test, which was a silly mistake. He knew how to spell the word.

Read-Aloud: Still working through The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom. We're getting introduced to the third Prince Charming now.

Bible: Continued through Romans and Proverbs.

History: Still none officially.

Science: We started reading Introduction to Biology by Holzmann. It's a bit dry, but there is certainly meat there. We'll give it a fair shot. This may be one I need to pre-read, then hand to him to read on his own, so he can really soak up the information.

The Brute

Math: We finished the first unit of 1A. Next, we'll move into Subtraction. These addition pages have been super easy, yet they're confidence building.

Reading: Still making steady progress here. Some words are getting into his brain without having to be sounded out. Hooray! Usually, sentences involving sharks are a-ok. :)

Handwriting: We practiced 'b', 'e', 'h', 'i', and 'j', plus some simple words such as 'be', 'he', and 'bed'. He's doing very well. We are continuing to use the white board right now, but we'll move to a pencil later.

Other: We've done Sonlight P4/5 pretty much at pace this week. Sometimes we rearranged 2 days so that the first half of both days was done on one day and the second half of both days the next day. That seems to help with some of the jumping around between books (like when there is a 4 line nursery rhyme, you don't really want to put the book down and switch to something else). He also continued the DEL workbook 1, and did very well on the pages for this week.

Mischief

Mischief is now bored with the C-rod Alphabet book and wants to do DEL instead, so I've been letting him do that with The Brute. I also have started MEP Reception, just to try it out. Below is a picture of part of the family we drew for lesson 2. He wanted to do "math" this week, and that was math closer to his level. He wanted to do Singapore Essential Math, but I would rather wait a year on that.

I drew DH and a dog, and Mischief drew me :)

Mischief is also joining in on phonogram flash cards for Dancing Bears. He knows almost all of the ones that The Brute is going through. These are one-sound only, not all the sounds. I was surprised that he knew phonograms such as "ar". Crazy.

Weekly Report - Year 3 Week 3

This week was a bit busy, as we had a doctor appointment Monday, then a specialist appointment Wednesday (all things clear - yay!), so we were only home all day 3 of the days, AND we had the A/C guy out Friday. We had a good week though. It was just laid back.

Tornado Boy

Math: We're into measurements now, and we took our time, doing just one lesson per day. :) Next week, we'll do measurements "Practice" section, then Volume, then it's just on to review and placement test. That's it for 4B! I imagine it will take us 2 weeks to complete all that, since those reviews and placement tests are LONG. We also did one section of Life of Fred Fractions this week.

Reading: He is over half done with Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. I'm way behind him, but plugging along. :) He is also reading Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom, which my dad gave him this week. He got two other books from my dad also, both similarly thick hardback books. They look good. I'm sure he'll enjoy them. No assigned reading yet until we get to week 4 or maybe 5 of Sonlight. In the meantime, he's really close to his 10,000 pages goal for the summer reading program with our homeschool group. Finishing LOTR will do it, and he still has 2 weeks left, though he might meet the goal before finishing LOTR, since we hit the library today and got a bunch of new books! :)

Grammar: We inadvertently skipped grammar this week. Oh well.

Writing: We moved on to Lesson 3 in SWI-A this week. He watched the video, then proceeded to rewrite "The Boy and the Nuts", but he made it, "The Zombie and the Nuts". He didn't get very creative with it, but I'm also not surprised about that. He made it an Athlete Zombie instead of a "Boy" (all the 3rd grade boys around here are into a game called Plants and Zombies right now, and he got to play it at a friend's house Wednesday and learn a bunch about the details of the game, including names of different types of zombies as seen above). Other than it being a zombie and the pitcher being "damaged", the story was basically the same. But hey, it's a good start! This is not my creative child. I know The Brute would be going off into the weeds with such a creative rewrite. :) I think as Tornado Boy gets used to this writing business, his creative side will come out too. ;)

Spelling: We finished the Week 18 review and did the test. He did very well, and I'm seeing better spelling in his writing assignments already. Woohoo!

Read-Aloud: Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom. Yes, Tornado Boy is reading it himself, but I'm also reading it to all 3 children out loud.

Bible: We started reading Romans this week and continued reading a Proverb most days.

History: None (officially).

Science: He finished reading the Apologia Astronomy book on his own. We'll start SL Science next week, I think.

The Brute

Math: We mostly did very early word problems this week. So far, they're easy peasy. While we could probably skip ahead a bit, I'm trying to keep math "easy", since reading is so difficult. I want him to be confident. He already feels bad that he can't read real books yet, so it's good for him to have math be easy, especially knowing that he's working one grade ahead.

Reading: We had a great week here! We have read the "Tim the Dim Cop" story in Dancing Bears multiple times this week, and each time, he has gotten faster and it's been easier. We are almost done with the Power Page after that story, and then we started the next page a little bit as well. He's definitely gaining some confidence. Today, we read part of Hop on Pop, and he was able to read most of it, with just a bit of help on the sounds he hasn't had yet ("all", "mouse", etc.). He did very well with those new sounds, and I think he was even figuring out some on his own, like "play". Yipee! For our 'm'/'n' confusion issue, I got a photocopy of one page of PAL Writing where it shows 'm' as the "mountain letter" and 'n' as the "nose" letter. I showed him those and discussed it some. He definitely had an easier time figuring those two out that day! I will continue to use that method. For 'b'/'d',we're using the instructions in Spalding - 'b' makes a line with your mouth when you say /b/, and 'd' makes a circle with your mouth when you say /d/.

Handwriting: We only did handwriting one day this week. I'm a complete and total slacker in this department, and it's one I need to get back to! Maybe I should put reading and handwriting together in our first session. He can go for about 30 minutes, and we've been doing reading and math, then later we do handwriting... maybe. Anyway, we did the letter 'b' this week. He tried to make it like a '6' (the HWT style '6'!), and it took some work to get him to stop doing that, but I did get some nice 'b's out of him eventually. I'll definitely have to watch how he does that each time for a while, so he doesn't keep a bad habit of the weird way (he goes straight down, then goes along the base line and around back to the line). I wonder if it's partly because the clock letters all go counterclockwise, and 'b' goes clockwise. So confusing.

Other: This week, we had box day! Sonlight P4/5 came in on Tuesday, a day early! The Brute was so excited!! He LOVES the Bible and is enjoying the stories we're reading. We went ahead and started it Wednesday and Thursday, and we finished the whole first week. Oops! We are doing the Developing the Early Learner books that come with it, and I think they will be nice for figuring out The Brute's strengths and weaknesses, since he's so hard to figure out most of the time. He's done well on the exercises so far except the tracing one. He can't remotely stay on the line without stopping! I don't know that Tornado Boy could do that. :P

The Brute enjoying the Sonlight box :)

Mischief

Mischief worked on his C-rod Alphabet Book and also started the DEL book above (I made a copy). He is likewise doing well in the book, missing the tracing completely and having some issue with the missing object exercise (4 objects on the table, take one away and they circle which object is missing). After completing the page, we practiced it a bit, and once he understood what he was supposed to do, he had no problem with it. I'm sure he'll do fine with that exercise next time it comes around.

Weekly Report - Year 3 Weeks 1-2

This should technically be week 3, but we took off a week for VBS (with a gospel meeting in the evening and a singing with a new song book at the end of the week... what a great week!). So we've done weeks 1 and 2 of 3rd grade/K, and it's gone very well so far!

Tornado Boy

Math: We did some geometry and have now gotten into data and probability, bar diagrams, etc. We should finish 4B (including review and placement test) in the next couple weeks.

Reading: I'm not assigning reading right now, but he reads all the time anyway. Recently, he has re-read the entire SOTW series (volumes 1-4), the D'Aulaire Norse Myths book (multiple times), and The Hobbit (which I read alongside him... he beat me). He'll start Fellowship of the Ring soon, once he pries it out of my hands. Ha! He also reads various and a sundry books that he finds around the house, library books, etc. The kid is always reading.

Grammar: We've done 2 exercises of KISS since we started. We're in level 1.2 and did exercises 5 and 6.

Writing: Here is where things are really shining right now!!! We have done 3 paragraphs for IEW SWI-A, and it is going fabulously. He enjoyed the lesson we watched on the DVD, he has no problem doing a keyword outline, and best of all... He can WRITE from the keyword outline! Woohoo! It's pretty painless for him. He thinks of a sentence based on the keywords, and he writes it down. He writes in pen and asks to spell words or tries to spell them phonetically. I have been so pleased with this program so far. It's like a light bulb has gone on!

At the end of SWI-A video - gravity at work :)

Rough draft of "Starfish" paragraph - written "with ease"!

Spelling: We've done 2 weeks of R&S Spelling 3. Next week, we'll finish week 17 and start reviewing (week 18).

Read-Aloud: None going on right now.

Bible: We've been continuing through Acts and also reading Proverbs daily (the chapter that corresponds with the day of the month), discussing the different themes we come across and applying them to our lives.

History: None right now (though again, he's read SOTW 1-4 recently ;).

Science: We have done lessons 2-5 in Apologia Astronomy the last couple weeks. We've learned about the Sun, Mercury, Venus, and Earth. We did the crater demonstration, where you drop rocks into flour. I learned that that is not one you want to do in the house. Just sayin'.

Crater demonstration

The Brute

Math: We have started Singapore 1A, and it is going swimmingly. This part is pretty easy, as he understands basic addition and has several number bonds memorized (thank you C-rods!). We have done number bonds under 10 and then focused on making 10's. Next week, we'll start working on early word problems. If he has any problem, this might be it just because language is an issue. But we'll see. He tends to surprise me! :)

Reading: We have conquered a few pages in Dancing Bears the last 2 weeks! I can really see his reading coming along. He still tries to guess sometimes, but then I tell him to read the word, and he will sound it out. :) He's starting to remember some words later in the page, so that's wonderful! I think it will still be a while before he's ready for real books, but today he successfully read about "Tim the Dim Cop". :P

Handwriting: We are using the Writing Road to Reading handwriting instructions, and this week, we finished the clock face letters. Next week, we'll get to b, e, and some others.

Science: Tagging along in Apologia Astronomy, he remembered that Mercury is really hot during the day and really cold during the night because it has no atmosphere, and Venus is really hot all the time because it has a thick atmosphere. He contributes a lot to our notebooking!

Mischief

Mischief has been doing a Cuisenaire Rod Alphabet Book and loves it. He is so proud of himself for doing his "school". When he finishes that, I plan to do R&S ABC series. I think he could handle that now. He's pretty good with fine motor skills. We'll also play with the C-rods to learn their values a bit more. I work with him first thing in the morning, then work with The Brute, then finally Tornado Boy. It's working well so far.

"That's an 'A'!"