It has been challenging to get back into a routine after the holidays, especially since Hubs and I went away for our anniversary over MLK weekend, and the Babysitters-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless provided way too much fun for these children! They want to keep the good times going and not buckle down.
Well here's a rundown of what we've been doing in the new year.
Language Arts:
We've covered the parts of a sentence and have begun learning about prepositional phrases and clauses. We are starting to do some sentence analysis in our Practice Island book. We did some worksheets on capitalization and comma placement. We've been working on writing short poems (laborious!) and writing similes. I tried to get them to write short stories with a sentence prompt, but that concept didn't take hold in their brains. We'll have to keep trying with that. They read a few history related books independently and have also been reading a Thea Stilton book for their upcoming book club meeting. In spelling we've covered words with
au, aw, o as in
log, al as in
halt and
all.
We just finished learning all the lower case cursive letters. I'm going to start assigning some written work to be all in cursive.
We are listening to
Inkheart in the car, and all of us want to keep driving around to hear more of it. We don't want to come in the house! Great story!
Math:
We've been reviewing multiplication facts by working on Kumon workbooks. They did a little multiple digit addition and subtraction review as well. We covered Lessons 21 & 22 in MUS Gamma, which are introducing multiple digit multiplication.
History:
We learned a little more about Prussia. We studied our big maps to see where modern day Germany is, and we pointed out all the countries we can identify on the map. We learned about conflict in the New World and King Louis XIV of France sending over troops to fight the Native Americans. We learned about the strife between the Wampanoag and the Plymouth colonists. We learned about William Penn establishing a colony for Quakers in the New World.
Science:
We have been learning about acids and bases and acid-base reactions. We made two different kind of base indicators and tested out some household cleaners and other substances to see if they were acids or bases.
French:
We've been reviewing everything we've learned so far and today we had a scavenger hunt. I hid clues around the house and the boys found them. The grand prize was lunch at Panera, including a pastry!
 |
| Some of my clues were misspelled, but they didn't catch on. |
Latin:
We've learned caveat emptor and ex libris.
Music:
We reviewed all the songs we've learned and learned the high C on the recorder. They started practicing Corn Song.
Life Skills:
We worked on phone manners, and are supposed to be working on eating with utensils. That will be on ongoing project!
Health:
We talked about common household hazards. We had a discussion about what we will need to do to babyproof the house for when we start babysitting The Tiny Girl.
We reviewed the food groups and made a shopping list of fruits and vegetables. The boys shopped from their lists by themselves at Whole Foods. I think they did a fine job, but we have about 30 bananas. Guess I'll be freezing quite a few for shakes.
P. E.
We've been having dance parties in the living room and doing segments of a kids workout video we got from the library.
Art:
We did Lesson 10 in Artistic Pursuits, which is about showing your works. I told them we would have an art show at some point. I also had them make self portraits. Ugh. They really are not artists, although this is some of their best work to date!
We haven't done much in Chess, except play a game or two. Need to get back to that.
I let them each have one day to choose the schedule of classes for the day. I was surprised by what they chose. They both chose Language Arts, Handwriting, History, Reading, Science and Recess. Andrew also chose Chess and Art, while Ed chose Health, Life Skills and a double dose of Science. Neither chose Math! Guess they're going to have to do some Math in the summer to catch up! ;)
