Homeschooling Week 16: St.Louis, Earth Sun Moon, Popper's Penguins and yes still multiplication.

We are finally back to work after what felt like a very long winter break. We were all excited to be back at it and had a great week working.

We picked back up on Mr. Popper's Penguins and read 4 more chapters along with lots of vocabulary and comprehension questions. We also talked about different kinds of occupations, one in particular was a veterinarian. To get a better understanding of what a veterinarian does we turned to Tia Uh-laine. She works for a great animal hospital in San Luis Obispo and she put us in contact with a veterinarian she works with. We emailed her a few questions and I hope we get them back soon!

On of our lapbook assignments was to learn about newspapers. Now personally I think we are seeing the end years of newspapers in print but I guess it's good for Phi to learn about it. We talked about the different sections of a paper and then we found a free online program to make our own newspaper. 

 And we continued our uphill battle with multiplication. The work for the week has already moved on to divison but Phi is still struggling with memorizing multiplication. I think I finally stumbled upon something that is working. Multiplication.com is a fantastic website, there are quizzes and games to make learning a bit more fun, but what I think is working are the picture stories for each problem. Here is an example...

After Phi listens to the story she can remember the these little word tricks. We have yet to "test out" of the 4's but she has made much more progress than she has in weeks.

On another note, has anyone seen this way to divide?

This was completely new to me. I come from straight old school math where we memorized everything! 

Joey and Phi also worked on a social studies and all about the settlers in St. Louis. They learned how business helped develop the city. 

Science this week was super awesome. We learned all about how the earth, sun and moon all revolve and rotate. We had an assignment to place a stick in the ground and monitor how the shadow changes and moves during the day. Of course the only day we had enough time for this was a super cloudy day with no shadows so we had to come up with a different way to show that Phi understands the concept. Of course it involved costumes, sound effects and a video.

We also had her trace and measure the shadow for certain times of the day on her paper. 

It was a fun week and kept us busy! I see a solar system project in our future!