Friday Follow-Up

August 22-26th

We had a busy week - lots of little "extras" going on, but we still had a great week of school.

Lucy is moving right along with her reading program. It is SO easy to follow/teach and she is picking things up quickly. She will be reading whole books in no time!! The best part is that she is so excited about reading!!!

She did a little sorting and graphing this week and a lot of counting. I briefly introduced her to the number words and she spelled then with letter tiles - while looking at the words. She did a little adding - which is is so excited to be doing!! While I know Lucy knows/recognizes numbers 1-20, I wanted her to practice matching the numbers to sets of objects so she worked with a puzzle similar to this.

Lucy is working her way through the You Can Read sight word curriculum from 1+1+1=1. I love it! You introduce 4 words at a time and there are so many different ways for Lucy to see/spell/read the sight words.

I am still reading Charlotte's Web to Lucy at quiet time. She can only handle one chapter a day (unlike Norah - I would never stop reading if it was up to her), so it is taking us a little while to get through it. We should finish up this week and I am going to read The Hundred Dresses - this is one of my favorite.

Norah's favorite subject this week was writing. She would finish her assigned writing and then would ask for more. Most days I just told her to write something in her journal. She wrote several letters, made some lists and by Friday she had written a little story. She is a great speller, but I still chuckle when I read words that she sounded out but is way off! I love that she is trying and not getting frustrated if she doesn't automatically know. My favorite this week was announcement - she spelled it "annownsmint." We also did a couple of Mad Libs on Thursday to reinforce what she learned about nouns, verbs, and adjectives. You can see from the picture below that she thought they were hilarious!!!

We played checkers this week to work on some logic and problem solving!! Norah's goal is to practice regularly so she can beat Kevin!

I am not sure if I have mentioned this or not, but Norah's least favorite thing to do is math. This is a little heartbreaking to me. Math was my thing. I LOVED it and always did better in math than anything else. She does fine - it isn't hard for her - there just isn't any creating/imagining involved! She worked on multiplication this week - we did a lot of hands on stuff. We used as many different counters/manipulatives as possible - just for the variety.

Norah loves to read so she flies through books. The Boxcar Children series is by far her favorite right now. This week she finished The Caboose Mystery and the Houseboat Mystery. She started Theater Shoes - this is a challenging book for her but so far she is really into it. I just found Mary Poppins at a used bookstore so she already said that is next.

History this week was about Columbus and other explorers. The girls made boats out of aluminum foil and raced them across the pool by blowing their sails. We talked about how wind really play a major role in how quickly the ships moved - which went right along with our science unit on air.

For art this week - we let the girls paint the plywood that is covering the big hole in our fence (a teenager drove into our backyard a couple of weeks ago).

I know I promised a post dedicated completely to Daphne's Tot School! It is coming - just not today!! For now, I will just give you a few pictures of a few of the things Daphne did this week!

a little play-doh time with Norah

putting hair rubber bands around a door handle

a little coloring - a favorite activity!