Homeschool Week 8: Bottles, Bats and Beavers

We had a fun week filled with art projects. This week Phi started a new book and Louie started to read! Isn't it unreal how one week they don't know the letter D and the next week they are reading. Kids be crazy.

Louie

Language Arts: We worked on the letter Gg this week. We talked about geckos, grandmas and of course gangstas. Something clicked with Louie this week. She is flying through all her flashcards and blending sounds all just make sense to her. She is now reading book #1 and #2 of the Bob book series. It's amazing. She is working on the -ap and -at work families and is doing so awesome. I was really getting worried that maybe homeschooling from kinder was going to be too much for us. I mean we would be in charge of teaching her the basics, but I am much more confidant that we got this.

Reading: We worked on breaking up a story into 3 parts, a beginning, a middle and an end. My go-to story for all these projects is Lilo and Stitch. Throughout the week after each story we talked about what happened in the beginning, the middle and the end. We talked about how the beginning introduces us to the characters and the setting, how the middle is the exciting part and the end summarizes and pulls everything together.

Writing: Louie finished writing her story. One assignment this week was to make a cover for her story. She decided to call it "The Best Off-Road".

Math: Number 7 this week. We are still working on counting to 20 and she still consistently misses a few numbers. We also worked on positional words like above, below, beside, between, etc. There were a lot of fun worksheets for this project and Louie did fantastic with this.

Social Studies: Because Columbus Day landed this week social studies was about Christopher Columbus. When I saw the topic for this week I almost emailed the teacher to see if I could switch it out for something else. I do not believe that Christopher Columbus should be celebrated, he did not "discover" America. This is offensive for 2 reasons. First he never actually made it to America and second you cannot discover something that is already populated. It devalues the Native Americans who were living here long before any Europeans. And I can almost guarantee there will be no Cesar Chavez assignment come March. (Stepping off my soapbox). Instead of being that parent I decided to just downplay this section and go about it like a historical fact and not something or someone to celebrate. Here is Louie's ship in a bottle project.

Science: Louie is learning about bats and apparently she is an expert now. Her and Poppa talked a lot about bats this week. When she got to me we did a Venn Diagram all about bats vs birds. Louie was able to do this with no problem. She also had to complete a project of her (my) choice about bats. None of the projects on the school website appealed to us so off to Pinterest I went. I found this really cute bat watercolor project and knew Louie would love it. So Louie and Poppa worked together to make this adorable art piece. On the back Louie listed some "Bat Facts"

Phi

Language Arts: Phi started a new book this week. A classic that most 5th graders read, "The Sign of the Beaver". I do not think I have ever read this. She read chapters 1-6 and had some comprehension questions and other worksheets. Phi is working so much more independently but I still look over all her work at the end of the week. Looking over her answers I could tell that she was not really comprehending the story so we sat down and read it together out loud. This story has a lot of old-time slang and the Native American 'accent' in this book is a little bit difficult to understand. I am looking forward to reading more with her.

Math: We are continuing working with decimals this week. This time we looked at rounding. This was easy and we are still taking math really slow and working on math almost everyday.

Social Studies: And on the complete opposite end of what her sister learned this week, Phi focused on Native Americans of the Northwest. She picked a tribe from the area and did some research on the tribe. She choose the Chinook Tribe from the Washington/Oregon area. She made a small book about the tribe, the shelters they made, the food they ate and the clothing they wore.

She also made a toilet paper totem pole that represented our family. (I didn't get a photo!). She looked at what the animals represents and choose one for each of us. It was very cute! She also wrote a short paragraph explaining why she choose each animal.

Science: We dove into plants. We started looking at the parts of plants and the teacher assigned this great website . It is all about a detective trying to solve mysteries about plants. Phi went through 3 different cases and learned about the female and male parts of the plant and how pollination is important for plants to reproduce.

We are 2 months in!