Saturday, September 15, 2012

Week 1

Whew!  I survived my first week with three official students.  Here's what we accomplished:

BIGS:

Literature:  Mikaela, Samuel, and I are reading Oliver Twist on our Kindles.


I caught them reading together on the couch earlier this week.

Math: Mikaela completed chapter 1 of Math-U-See PreAlgebra.  It covered adding of negative numbers.  Sam and I completed Sections 1-5 of Chapter 1 in Art of Problem Solving PreAlgebra.  It covered addition, subtraction, multiplication, and negation.  It covers positive and negative numbers and works you through "discovering" the properties of numbers in a way that you can manipulate impossible-looking problems to solve them easily.

History:  They are reading two books from the library:  Life in Charles Dickens's England and  Charles Dickens: England's Most Captivating Storyteller.

Pacific Northwest History: They completed activities from chapter 1 of the The Pacific Northwest: Past, Present, and Future.  I got this public school textbook for free a few years ago.  Chapter 1 is about Volcanoes and Glaciers.  I'm not requiring them to read the chapter, just find the answers for the activities I give them.  They completed vocabulary from the student activity pages, completed the map activity, wrote a timeline of the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, and made a table comparing continental and alpine glaciers.

Science:  They read the 13th chapter of Apologia Exploring Creation through Botany  It is about nature journaling, which I thought was an appropriate start to the year.  We started making our own hand-bound journals to use for sketches through the year.  I've completed mine first so I'd know what I was doing before I walked them through it.

Foreign Language: Sam went to his first class at Korean Language School.  It sounds like it went well for him.

LITTLES: 

Phonics: We went through the first five lessons of Phonics Pathways which covered a, e, i, o, and u.  Josh has them down.  Maddie knows a very well now, and gets the others most of the time.  We'll go through all five vowels again this week.

Literature:  Literature Pockets Nursery Rhymes is a BIG hit with the littles.  We did the first nursery rhyme, "A Little Bird."  They colored the covers of their books.  Then they colored the pocket label, colored the page containing the rhyme, made a little bird hand puppet, and thought of something little to substitute for the word bird in the rhyme.  They both know the rhyme pretty well now, though they don't have it down pat.



Math: I'm running Josh through Math-U-See Primer.  A friend found the TM/Video at a yard sale so I'm making up my own worksheets to go with it.  We went through chapters 1-3 which covered counting and number recognition.  He has no problems with either no matter how it is presented, but he can't write the numbers at all.  We just got our handwriting curriculum so I'm going to start with numbers on Monday.

Social Studies: We read the first two two-page spreads in Children Just Like Me.

Science: Josh colored the color if his plant log from Plants, Grades 1-3 by Evan-Moore.


Our first day of school was interrupted by a power outage.  We finished school without lights and then headed to the Western Washington Fair.  We enjoyed a few rides, visited the new rainforest adventure exhibit where Sam and I held a scorpion and Maddie touched it (there were lots of animals, some we've never heard of, there), and saw the Our Bodies exhibit.



Sam also took it upon himself this week to make a scale model of different star types.


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1 Comments:

Lynne said...

Looks like a great first week. Love the bigs reading on the couch together. Love the video -hop, hop, hop!

Evan Moor Pockets rock!