In case you can't guess from the following pictures, we are on letter D this week. And D is for dinosaur.
Bible Verse: "Do all things without complaining or arguing." Phillipians 2:14
Song: I'll praise you with a dance
Rhyme: Diddle Diddle Dumpling
Things learned this week:
Letter D (handwriting and sign)
Spelling Words: dad, den, dig, did, dip, dot, dug, do
States: California and Colorado (I started checking out a series of states books from the library this week. There is a lot of content, so I just read little bits while they do their Target workbook.)
Math: Pattern blocks, Balance, Doubles (0-9), 1st Math Drill page (doubles 0-5), learned to self check on flashcards
Science: Types of weather (started doing a weather song during circle time to the tune of "Oh My Darlin'")
Reading: "And then it rained..." with Venn diagram
Art: Donut collage
Here is Charlotte's shelf at the beginning of the week. The dinosaurs that my neighbor let me borrow were a huge hit. We had big ones, and then some small ones that I put with some duplo blocks as scene. Another highlight was the sequencing dinosaurs... ordering seven cutouts largest to smallest.
Here are my Monday pupils working on their Target ABC books.
Then we repeated our PE routine from last week. The bandanas are a big hit. We use them like stepping stones to get across the "river." You have to stay on the stones, so the girls have to step to one bandana and then lay the other one out in front of them. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It's a lot of up and down, plus they are getting to fluff the bandana in flat on the floor.
Charlotte liked her dry erase coloring page this week too. She got it off her shelf several times. Caroline colored it once as well. She did each section in two colored stripes. I wish I'd taken a picture of that.
Caroline was in a silly mood during pictures this week. Here she is doing Read-Build-Write mats. We are using scrabble tiles for a few weeks to change up from reading rods.
Our math lesson is starting to overwhelm us both. Thankfully, I just realized that I can go from five lessons a week down to four, and still finish by the end of the year. Actually, we are 23% done!!
What overwhelms me is the amount of items involved in our lesson. But I see value in each one...
- Fill the date in on the calendar
- Write out the date on handwriting paper
- Add a straw to our place value cans (a highlight for Caroline)
- Write the number of straws on place value strip
- Practice handwriting on the number of the day
- Count to 100 ( I almost always skip this)
- Several other things that I leave out because Caroline has mastered them (patterns and graphing the weather)
- Then there is the actual lesson I teach her
- Work on flashcards now that she's learning her facts
- Then she does the worksheet
- And there's an independent worksheet for later in the day.
This week we add a "coin cup" which will be a coin purse in our case and we'll practice writing cents.
No wonder Caroline says she doesn't like math.
But, like it or not, she's doing a great job with it and it's something she needs to learn for life. Here's a fun day when we got to use the balance. I borrowed it from my neighbor. There was just one lesson this week, so I'm glad I didn't run out to buy one.
Here's a Venn diagram we made for a book called "And then it rained..." Then you turn over the book and it's called "And then the sun came out..." I read one story and Caroline read most of the other. It has a character named Matthew DeWitt that is a Christian and quotes scripture.
We are still moving forward with Hooked on Phonics. I've given up writing it into my lesson plans. I've been trying to pace us in the book so we don't go too fast, but Caroline has mastered most of the stuff we are covering (beginning sound combinations), so I'm just letting her do as much as she wants so we can get on to the second half of the 1st grade box (simple endings). Pluto is helping us on reading days so we remember to "paws" at the period.
The grand finale of our week was donuts on Friday. Caroline twisted my arm and said we must have donuts since donuts starts with D. And I figured, hey, that's as good a reason as any. So we invited our friends and SIX families joined us for donuts and then play at the park.
Poor little overrun store owners.
And then I had a brainstorm after seeing a collage post on The Wonder Years this week and getting donuts, so I changed our art project to D is for Donuts. I traced our big foam D and then cut out pink icing. Then I pulled some stuff I had around that looked like sprinkles and let the girls go to town. Again, it's so interesting that my 2 1/2 year old is so much more dainty in her use of glue than my almost five year old.
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