Sunday, April 3, 2011

Weekly Wrap-Up : Some KWL, Grammer and Sight Words

Bible
Besides working on our Awana verses and praying for our friends, we also started An Easter Devotional. I'll share more as we get into more, so I know if it's something I recommend or not.

But I've realized that I need something planned for this special time with my kids or else I skimp on our devotional time.... which is one of the great blessings of homeschooling as a Christian, teaching our kids about God, His story, His Word and our faith. So I'm thankful for this devotional for Easter and I'm going to use this time to make a plan for May & June!

Reading
Again, Lydia and Chris have been working on OPG. And I've been drilling both regularly on their Sight Words. I have found using a most used words as a Sight Word list has been very good for my kids. They learn simple words that are found everywhere and when they start "trying" to read books they are very confident because they already know soo many of the words they encounter in those books;) And a lot of "most used words" are sight words or words that they quickly learn to sound out;)

Anna has also been reading and reading this week. She and I have continued to work through another Robin Hood book as well as a Magic Tree House space book. She's also been reading some of the simpler books for Lydia and Chris. For free reading she's been reading an Abeka adaptation of Swiss Family Robinson:)

I'm not sure if I have included much about our Grammer lessons. I have been using First Language Lessons by Jesse Wise with Anna. And we love them:) Next year we'll see about using the 3rd/4th grade Language Lessons or changing methods to something else recommended by The Well Trained Mind. Until then we'll enjoy make funny sentences;)



Math

Lydia is still chugging away practicing her skills on ixl.com, working through numbers 1-20 and learning her doubles facts (something Anna and Chris are teaching her)!!

Chris did well with Saxon this week. I love how much he likes doing the worksheets, it's still such a surprise to me, I really thought he'd fuss about doing them. He is starting to slack on learning/practicing his math facts.... he was doing soo well so I backed off a bit to ease his workload:) So really it's ME that has to get him practicing again!!

Anna also needs some addition and subtraction fact practice. She can do the fact sheets each morning but not as quickly or easily as the manual seems to indicate she should. So we have some practicing to do with Anna, too!!

One of Anna's favorite lessons this week was perimeter;) She loves hands-on lessons... who doesn't??


Science
This week we studied the Moon. We had already had a week about the Moon in the Fall when we first started Earth Science. This wee we studied it in the context of the Moon being in space. I used a K-W-L Chart to help figure out what they already knew and what else we could learn about the Moon... I studied about using K-W-L charts in college, thought they were lame (just being honest)


Anyway, it was great. They liked the chart and I liked processing with them what they knew and some questions they had about the Moon. And by reading our reference books and some fun books from our local library it was a great Moon study week:)

We also made the phases of the Moon (it was a lapbook element).


And studie about the Blue Moon and painted our own Blue Moons, after the bigger globs of glue dried... don't miss that step, we almost did;)



History
We had a "quiet" history week. Our unit was on the Diaspora.... the what??? LOL... the spreading of the Jewish Nation when they had to leave Jerusalem under Roman rule. The placement of this unit was weird to me because we'vre already talked about the Crusades when Jerusalem was under Muslim control which happened YEARS, like hundreds after the Diaspora??? Anyway, that's been my only "beef" with Story of the World soo far.

So we read our chapters and a couple of books that out librarian had found about Jerusalem and the people who live there. Our favorite book was called The Wailing Wall by Leonard Everett Fisher. The kids colored a picture of the Temple in Jerusalem and worked on a lapbook element from here.

Picture of the Week
While having a "homeschool room" is NOT necessary to homeschooling, it is nice!! I thought abuot how thankful we are to have it and be able to leave our un-finished projects out:)



And I'm posting this on Sunday night, just amazed at how quickly the weekend has gone! And getting ready for a new week... we've got Revival meetings at our church each evening during the beginning of the week, lots of history to cover and hopefully some more sunny days to enjoy:)

I'm linking up to the Weekly Wrap-Up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers!

3 comments:

Jenny said...

That is so awesome that the older kids are helping to teach Lydia! You must love to see that!

LOL about the K-W-L charts, I learned about those too in early childhood education and thought they seemed kind of forced. However, when you really use them, it makes sense!

The moon unit looks like it was pretty fun!

Ashley said...

I like hearing how you like products. I just ordered the First Language Lessons for next year and I'm glad to hear that you like it!
It looks like you had a fun week!

Angela said...

Love your post about home schooling!
Is the word puzzle in the second picture the thing you references with Anna or is it something different? I have some sight word things I'm working on with Eden and think that would be a great next step. Would you mind sharing where you found it?