week 3 review

(week 3: May 30 - June 3, 2011)

I added a scripture of the week to start our school time every day. This week, it was Doctrine and Covenants 88:118 - "And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith."

Monday was Memorial Day and the girls had a science morning with Dad. They went to visit some friends from church (while I stayed home in the quiet!!!!) who shared their garden produce with us. They looked at various vegetable plants, got rides on the riding lawn mower, and picked lots of green beans, banana peppers, green bell peppers, cucumbers and cob lettuce.

Handwriting: I made Sunny start working on her letters again rather than letting her drag things out with pre-writing drills. I've also modified the attack plan: just plain lined paper (the big lines with the dotted line in the middle) and I write the letter 3 times, then we write it together 3 times. Then she has to write it by herself until she gets 3 good ones. If it takes her 10 attempts, so be it. If she does it well in 3 or 4, she can stop. She seems to do better this way - a certain amount rather than just keep going over and over until the timer goes off. We did straight line letters this week - A, E, F, and H.

Math: measurements
T - inch, foot, yard - we measured how tall Sunny and Posy are, how tall our tomato bushes are, and compared.
W - height, length, width - we measured the couch and the table to learn the different dimensions.
Th - weight, ounce, pound - they weighed a number of small toys on our little kitchen scale, and themselves on the bathroom scale. Sunny also randomly pulled out her addition workbook and figured some of the equations in it. Just for fun, I guess?
F - reviewed all the concepts with a worksheet that I made up, where they did criss-cross lines to connect the word (height) with the definition (how tall something is).

Five in a Row: The book for this week was Grandfather's Journey by Allen Say. We did one-page "book reports" of all 3 books we've completed for this section. Sunny and Posy each told me their favorite part of the book, I wrote the sentences, and they drew a picture.

Literature: We finished the collection of Greek gods and goddesses and did just one book report for the whole thing - Sunny chose the story of Hermes stealing Apollo's cows. That put our book report total at 4 for the week. I did have to explain about summarizing - at first, Sunny insisted that I rewrite word-for-word the part of the story that was her favorite part.

Science: More observing in the garden and counting tomatoes every day. They're green but there are quite a few! And we got our first cucumbers! AC also read a Magic Schoolbus book to the girls about ant colonies.

PE: Swimming only Monday and Wednesday because we had things going on the other evenings.

Sidenote: The Well-Trained Mind book refers to the "book reports" as narration and uses this structure for the child to report back to the parent/teacher what s/he has learned from the reading. They're used in literature, history, and science. No testing! The parent does the actual writing at first until each child's handwriting is getting up to speed. They start with 1-2 sentence reports in 1st-2nd grade, and gradually work up to paragraphs and essays.