We are officially homeschoolers...
The first 3 days were just ideal and then reality set in and I was ready to send the kids back to school on the 4th day. I came to the conclusion though that I already knew there would be days like this, so I just needed to take them in stride and have faith that the next day is a new day and that’s that.
We’ve done a lot of review this week and mixed in a few new concepts.
I’m just getting my feet wet into what homeschooling is all about. I’m sure it’s going to take us a little bit to figure out what is working and what’s not.
Here’s what the kids did this week though and a few pictures mixed in…
LANGUAGE ARTS
Spencer read a few of Aesop’s fables to me and then I had him narrate back to me what he read and what he understood. He read The Ant and the Grasshopper, and The Lion and the Horse, which is REALLY funny! He also wanted to read the “little Peter Rabbit book”, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. We read quite a few pages and still have a few to go. We talked about long and short vowels and gave examples. I found a Rhyme a week program that we have been doing. The kids really enjoy this! It has a two fold mission around here. They usually act it out, which gets them out of their seats and moving…because they need it… and then it teaches them rhyming words. For instance we did Jack and Jill this week and learned a lot of –ill words. The kids LOVED when I told the rhyme fast, then slow, then soft…and just changed it up so they could change up their movements. The website has riddles too which I used with the –ill word cards and they got to choose which word went with the riddle. We mostly did this while Carson was at preschool.
Andrew read a couple of the Dick and Jane books with me and then he also did this book and another booklet like it from Hubbard’s Cupboard that I heard about from Susana in this post, while Spencer and I read together. The words we worked on were: I see we will look something yellow blue come funny. He learned a lot of the sight words last year during preschool so some of the words we have started off with are review. He participated in the Rhyming program too. He also knows the difference between vowels are and the consonants. We worked on 3 letter words with our phonics cards in our Accelerated Achievement curriculum.
MATH
We used workbooks a lot this week. Spencer is reviewing simple addition and subtraction. Andrew is working on recognizing numbers, writing them correctly, and adding using dominoes.
I found this awesome domino parking lot from a blog {I’m sorry I can’t remember whose it is} and the kids have loved adding up the dominoes and parking them in the right spot. Carson gets all of the dominoes that are over 12 and he thinks he is adding them up too ☺ One day we only “parked” the even numbered dominoes since we worked on skip counting by 2’s this week and learned that those are even numbers. We compared how many dominoes were on each even number and then wrote those numbers on the board. We used our math symbols we are trying to learn to compare them… less than, greater than, add, subtract and equals. Spencer passed his little quiz I did on Friday on the symbols, but Andrew needs a little work remembering them.
Andrew also loves a math game I picked up at TJ Maxx where you put the puzzle together with a matching number, name of the number and items that add up to the number. He likes to see how fast he can do it.
We measured a few objects and wrote down the measurements. We took notice of which one was the least amount of inches and the most amount of inches. They measured small things with their rulers and big objects like the bookcase with a tape measure.
On Friday, Andrew dumped out all of his money out of his bank and was counting it, so I thought that would be a great math lesson. So we sorted the coins into quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies, then sorted those piles into dollars. We counted the money, recorded it, then added them up. I tried to get Spencer to add more in his head…and with using numbers that I would have to carry a number into the next column, I made sure they watched my process of doing that. I’m sure one of these days they will get it. We estimated how many pennies we thought there were, then the boys had to change their estimate a couple more times after we passed their 1st estimate.
The first numbers are the even domino numbers. It looks like we were trying to subtract but we were just comparing Andrew’s number of dominoes to Spencer’s and seeing if the numbers were less than, greater than, or equals to…
SCIENCE
For science this week, I used a 1st grade textbook that I found at a garage sale until I can find something else. It was okay… We talked about some science skills, such as observe, compare, classify, measure, predict…and a few more… then did a couple of chapters and the review.
We talked about living and nonliving things and our senses. We compared a lizard that the boys had caught and put in a jar, to some rocks that they boys had collected. We just mainly discussed the topics and then made a couple of charts.
I guess you could say we experimented a little with colors. The boys wanted to paint for their “art” class so we discussed colors and what happens when we mix certain colors. We discussed blue and yellow make green, orange is red and yellow, and red and blue make purple. I'm going to definitely go back and teach a little more on depth with this because they still asked me the second day which colors make green, orange and purple.
Spencer saw a volcano in one of our I Wonder Why books and was very interested in that. So we watched some YouTube videos on volcanoes and the boys were AMAZED! One video we watched was how to make a volcano, so they were all wanting to make one. We made a simple one, but this week, we might delve into trying to make one out of paper mache or something easier. Baking soda and vinegar work well, but Diet Coke and Mentos make a real explosion!!! ☺ This coming week, I think we might focus our science on volcanoes and study them more in depth. The boys did build a volcano with blocks and then of course they built an army out of all the baskets, blocks, and anything they could find to try and help save the people from the volcano. I just love their imaginations!!
HISTORY
For history, we went to this website and the boys learned about our nation, and did the symbols of our government. The bald eagle was one symbol of our nation and so we looked on YouTube and found some awesome videos of bald eagles. One video was shot in Alaska and the guy had over 30 bald eagles in his backyard, perched everywhere. It was AMAZING! It was interesting to hear the eagles talking to each other and letting the couple’s kids get rather close to them.
We are planning a trip to DC in the next couple of months as our belated “summer vacation”, so I thought we would talk about the things we would be seeing while we are there and the importance and significance of them. I didn’t purchase a history curriculum right up from because I was a little overwhelmed, but I think learning about these things will suffice for right now until I can decide.
NATURE STUDY
This week, we went to the Wateree River boat ramp right under the Wateree River bridge to just take in the nature. The following day, we discussed some of the things they heard and saw…crickets, butterflies, the flowing water, rocks, and a boat. Then I had the boys draw pictures of something they saw. They both drew pictures of the boat with a father and son in it.
Like I said…I’m STILL learning TONS everyday!! But I wanted to keep a record of what we did everyday, so I can make a book like Susana had of all their homeschool adventures ☺
Hope next week turns out okay!!
