Once more I am a little slow to summarize our previous week in schooling. However, we had a truly excellent week!
Monday Jonas began with a review of his reading and building words. He wrote many of these words out for me but only after he'd read them aloud. Ronan practiced writing his R's and his name while Jonas was reviewing his reading. We moved on from there to math where we reviewed the concept of half. I used the kids' blocks to illustrate half and gave them a number of blocks to divide into halves. Ronan stuck with the blocks but I eventually gave Jonas 6 numbers to divide in half and write the answers in his book.
Before we were done with school on Monday we read some poetry and talked about rhyming. Then we played a rhyming game: If I say _________, you say _________. At the end of our rhyming practice I gave the kids each a set of words and a blank space beside each word for them to write a rhyming word.
We practiced our violins together and then we were done with school for the day. Jonas is beginning to play Good King Wenceslas in preparation for Christmas. I hope to cover several Christmas carols so that we can play together by Christmas.
After horseback riding lessons with Ms. Monica on Tuesday we returned home to study Election day and voting! We accomplished this through a short reading about elections followed by yes or no statements about this reading (similar to True/False). We talked about who our current president was (Obama) and left a blank space open for writing in who won the election (Obama).
We discussed the voting process as well and then held our own vote for what we wanted to eat for dinner: chicken or ribs. We constructed a voting booth and ballots. We talked about voting privacy and made a graph of our results. Chicken won.
Last but not least we colored pictures of the American flag. Ronan got his colors right but put all his red stripes together and all his white stripes together. Jonas colored it beautifully.
On Wednesday Jonas built sentences from sightwords and Ronan practiced O's and N's. After reading and writing we talked about some plant vocabulary in Spanish: planta, flor, hoja, arbol, semilla, tronco... and the kids drew pictures representing the different words.
We had violin practice again and Ronan worked on playing his open strings without screeches. Jonas worked on his GM scale and Christmas carols.
Thursday we talked about how to tell what direction you are going when you are outside (based on the direction of the sun and time of day). They drew the sun traveling from east to west on their compass.
When we were at the farm-stand for our CSA share I had the boys inventory (through pictures) the kinds of vegetables we got.
Friday we played our rhyming game more and Jonas learned three new sounds (l, o and n) in lesson 7 of his reading book. I helped him write a sentence he wanted to write for grandma about horses also: Horses eat grass.
We have been trying to document most of what we accomplish in school but, as always, we do more than gets recognized in the books. We play Uno, practice rhyming, talk in Spanish, and many other things that are difficult to document in the boys' notebooks. I will continue to explore new ways of recognizing these extra things.
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