Week 6

August 23 - 27

This last week I have come closer to figuring out the best schedule for us.  This was our 6th week of school, and every week I have tweaked something.  When I looked at my first schedule that I made a few months ago, this new one is quite different.  My biggest change is doing subjects for longer periods of time on fewer days.   I am also going to have more for my 2 year old to do so that we can hopefully do more school work in the morning instead of only during his nap.  We tried this a few times this week, and it went pretty well.

So onto week 6...

Math
This week we continued with number bonds in Singapore Earlybird Kindergarten Math B.  K is understanding , and she enjoys the activity book. 

Language Arts
We took another week off from the Ordinary Parents Guide, and just read BOB books and Hooked on Phonics readers. She is doing really well with reading, but does not think she is. Before we read she says it is too hard, but then she reads the book pretty easily. For handwriting, K worked on the letter Pp, and she started the letter i section in Explode the Code 1.

Science
This week we read about rivers, volcanoes and mountains. I really like the Usborne Childrens Encyclopedia that Sonlight uses. Each segment is two pages and has just the right amount of information, and K likes the pictures. We even did a science experiment this week. (Honestly, I have no idea why this was scheduled this week, but it was.) For the experiment we needed a stalk of celery, blue food coloring, a cup, and water. This is the kind of experiment that I can do. K filled the cup with water, mixed in the food coloring and put the celery in the blue water. We were able to see after a couple of hours that the celery had taken up water all the way to the top of the stalk where the leaves would have been. There were blue lines from the bottom of the stalk to the top, showing how roots take water to all parts of the plant.


Geography
The first thing K asked when I told her it was time for Geography was, "Where are we going?" I'm glad she is getting into it! This week we went to Tanzania. One of my changes was to do Geography in one day. I had it divided up into 4 days, but we do not do very much so it just didn't make sense. We started off by finding Tanzania on our wall map, and then looking it up in the atlas. After talking about Mt. Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti, we read Papa, Do You Love Me?, the Tanzania section in Africa Is Not A Country, and the story from Tanzania in Around the World in 80 Tales. K colored the Tanzanian flag, and then colored in Tanzania on our black and white map. Our flag stickers did not include Tanzania, so I drew it in her passport and she wrote the date. She also watched Little Einstein: Rocket Safari, which takes place in Tanzania. Next week we will be moving on to Asia.

Theme
Colors & Shapes

Read Alouds
We read stories from the Tall Book of Nursery Tales, A First Book of Fairy Tales, Usborne Stories from BAround the World, Lion Storyteller, Mother Goose, and A Child's Book of Poems.