Homeschool Week 18: Sorting Clouds

Getting back into the swing of things was rough! But we did it and we are almost back into our groove.

Louie

Language Arts: This week was all about the letter "Ee". This came at the perfect time since Baby Ellie was just born and we are all obsessed with her. We did a lot of worksheets on the short e sound. Louie whipped through them. We worked on the -ed and -en word families.

Reading: This week we read a cute story called "Snowmen at Night", all about, you guessed it, what snowmen do at night. There were a few cute writing activities to go alone with this book. We did some pre-reading where Louie predicted what the snowmen would do. Then she wrote about what her snowman would do at night. Of course in her version her snowman is a BB-8 because everything is Star Wars.

Writing: We are back on the writing program the teacher is using and we have moved onto sentences. I loved how this week was set up. It made much more sense to me. We started with talking about how your can use sentences to show people how to do something with steps. The first day Louie drew pictures for the steps to get a drink of water. Then on day 2 we listed a bunch of things she was good at doing. Things like drawing, making her bed, getting dressed etc. Then on day three she wrote out how to sentences with pictures.

Math: We have moved on to adding numbers! We are starting with adding objects. I was worried about math with Louie because Phi has such a hard time with it. I am finding that Louie is doing pretty good. I think that Phi might be confused because she started learning math one way at her old school and then a totally new way here. Louie seems to be doing really well.

Social Studies: We are looking at different jobs in our community. Jobs that help our community run. We looked at a bunch of different jobs and Louie had to pick one community job she would want to do and start working on a presentation. She picked a veterinarian of course! She facetimed Tia Elaine to get some ideas for her outfit. A flyer was also sent home asking parents to come in a talk about their jobs. Now my j-o-b would be boring to kids but the teacher said that Girl Scout Leader would work too. So now Louie and I are both working on a presentation.

Science: Sorting and comparing objects by properties of matter. We did a few worksheets and did a few games where we sorted things. Her favorite was sorting Star Wars characters into a droid category or human category.

Phi

Language Arts: Not sure what is going in with Phi and her reading but her comprehension is really bad with "The Westing Game". I think there is just too much going on in the story and she is always trying to get through her work as fast as she can to get back to drawing. This week she read Ch. 13-16 but when it was time to work on worksheets she could not answer any questions. So we spent the weekend reading the chapters out loud and stopping every few paragraphs to go over what we read and what was happening in the story. It was so much that I started dreaming about the story. We got through the chapters and she got her worksheets completed. She also started a really fun project. She is making the 5 story tower and each window will have a player in the game along with 3 events from the book. Each window will include a list of physical traits and personality traits and a quote from the book to back up the list. This is a great long term project, I just wish we would have been given the assignment at the beginning of the book so that we don't not have to go back to look for quotes. We could have been highlighting them along the way.


Math: We continued looking at how fractions function. I liked this week because it was a good overall review for her. We are still struggling with multiplication tables. The amount of work is good. It lets us work on math everyday but only 1-2 problems.

Social Studies: We are still looking on explorers. At this point I can't even remember what history we are doing. Is it US history? I know that we are studying different explorers from Europe that colonized america and parts of south america. This week we studied Ponce de Leon as well as the relationship between the Native Americans and the Explores and how is changed over time. Phi wrote a great essay about it.

Science: Clouds. This week we looked at different types of clouds. What they look like, where they are located and the type of precipitation they bring.

In the middle of the week we got hit with some big news. Phi's teacher was offered a position she could not refuse (I can't imagine what would be better than teaching my kid. haha!) and is going to be leaving us in just 2 weeks. This hit us hard because she had been Phi's teacher for the last 3 years. After a rough start I have grown to really admire and respect her. We work well together and I really believe that our open line of communication and flexibility is a big part of Phi's success in this program. All kids need an adjustment period when introduced to a new teacher and going through that in the middle of the year is tough. We are going to have to make sure that we all get through this as best as we can.