homeschooling, week 5

On Monday, we started with some handwork.  The night before I poked holes into a foam flower and threaded some embroidery floss onto a fat needle. I have ZERO craft skills and I'm desperate for my daughter not to follow my fate. For now I am looking for simple projects that even I could teach her to pull off, but it is likely that lessons outside of the home will be in her future.

This week we alternated between reading and math each day.  The math lessons are longer and I like to spend a lot of time on them.  Sanji is an advanced reader for her age, and we do multiple lessons on reading days. She also reads aloud to various family members, every day. I keep feeling nervous about the math. Math is not my thing.  I'm glad I have a program that is scripted and multi-sensory.

This week we learned more about quadrilaterals, and learned about perpendicular lines. This was the first week that we got to use our geoboards. I asked Sanji to make a square on her board with a rubber band, then I would draw the square onto a little geoboard I printed out.  After she had done several squares, she was asked to place them from largest to smallest.  We then did the same thing with rectangles.  We also continue to work on showing numbers 1-10 on our fingers, abacus, and with tally marks.

showing 9 on abacus, with fingers and with tally sticks

We finally had a little sunshine this week and it was glorious.  It lasted the whole weekend, but I was too sick to enjoy it.  Now we are expecting rain again, tomorrow. I'm glad I was well enough Thursday and Friday to get out for some nice walks with the kids.

my daughter can not resist slugs (ew!)

Sometimes in the morning when I am not fully prepared to just sit and get to it, I like to have an activity for Sanji to work on, a coloring sheet or a maze or crossword puzzle. But my favorite thing is this Doodle Tin! Each wipeable card gives you a topic to draw and it sparks alot of imagination and creativity and we can often make a story out of her drawing.

drawing favorite foods on the grill

We will finish All About Reading Level 1, on Monday!  I have to be honest, I did not do any of the activities that required cutting or removing pages from the book.  My intent was/is to sell this program once I finish it.  I am lightly considering saving it for my littlest, although I don't know that I will homeschool him, not that I am opposed to doing so.  There are just so many other factors that will go into what is decided for him, depending on where he is developmentally at school time. We did do every fluency exercise. However, on Friday when I saw that I could just copy one page for each of the games that corresponded with the lessons we were doing, I thought it would be a fun treat to do so.  These lessons taught the additional sounds of letters with more than one sound, the vowels, ch, and s.

The games were that I would say a letter sound and she would cover it with a coin or a block or a candy. I had some M&M's and I knew it would be a hit and that she'd be willing to play several times as I wanted her to memorize ALL the vowel sounds. While we were playing, we were treated to quite the sight in our backyard!

this stunning young man was just outside our window

Another perk to homeschooling is that there is always time for an impromptu foot massage.

Our week also included one play date, piano lesson and theater lesson. We have been thinking of joining girl scouts but I'm torn. There is a homeschool troop but their meeting time and location might not be ideal for us. There is a local meeting to place girls, this week, and I'm thinking of going just to see if there is a Daisy troop forming near us that would be open to a homeschooler joining them.

Oh! I also started working on my theme week schedule, I laugh as I type this because I hardly can imagine myself keeping up with it, but we'll see. My oldest leaves for outdoor school for 4 days tomorrow (wah, don't go!!) and my plan is to hit the library after dropping him off so that I can get a pile of books on Fall & Apples. I'll let you know next week, how that goes.