Weekly Wrap-Up

Week 2 went off without a hitch. We're all having an absolute blast learning at home. This past week (March 9-13) looked something like this:

M:
* Reading - Molly the Brave and Me, Puss in Boots, Samantha the Snob, Daisy Jane & Alexander Graham Bell's Talking Machine (M's favorite)
* Reading Comprehension - M read about elephant noses & a math contest this week (She learned more about finding the main idea and identifying story elements.)
* Grammar - Lesson 4, 5 & 6 (She learned about forming plurals of words that end in s, sh, ch, x or z; forming plurals of nouns that end in y; irregular nouns and common and proper nouns.)
* Spelling - Steps 2-7 (Moving right along like I thought we would, eventually we'll slow down, but I suspect that we'll sail right through books 1 & 2 until that happens. She finally got to do her lessons with the white board and magnetic titles this week, so she was a happy camper.)
* Phonics - Lesson 6-10 (She still continues to love phonics the most of all. I still continue to be baffled by this. She's flying through this book (each lesson is 10 pages or more). I had scheduled out for this book to take 8 weeks - she'll be down with it by Wednesday. I ordered the next book last night; hope it gets here by Thursday morning!)
* Writing - Lesson 2 (She learned what a subject and a predicate is, and that each sentence has to have both to be a complete sentence.)
* Copywork - She finished up the last part of Bed in Summer and started on Young Night Thought
* Geography - Week 2 (She learned how to read a map.)
* Math - Lesson 7-9 & quiz 1 (We had a hiccup with our main math curriculum this week as the school computer needed to have a fan replaced, so she missed two days of math lessons on the computer. But, don't worry, I did not let my child go math-free for two days. We started Rocket Math this week, which is a math program designed to build fluency and automaticity with math facts. She knows all of her addition facts, but I would like for her to not even have to think about the answer - just for her to know it. (Right now we are working on all the addition facts, and once she has those down pat, we'll move onto the subtraction facts.) She did two levels and three timed tests this week in Rocket Math. I've also ordered another math curriculum - Life of Fred. It's got super rave reviews from kids; Fred is just so funny. It's a way of teaching math in a living book style - which can be hard to find. We won't be changing our main spine for math (Teaching Textbooks) but I'm hoping it will be a fun supplement.)
* Handwriting - M learned how to form/write cursive letters c, a & d and how to connect them

T:
* Math - Lessons 6 - 12 (right/left; top/middle/bottom; counting and writing numbers 1-5)
* Reading - Endings -ot, -op & -ox and lots and lots of reading (T is really enjoying reading now and often requests to read 3 or more books to me a day. This week we read Bob Books, Playful Pals & Starfall readers)
* Writing - T is doing lots of writing in history & science, so I haven't made him do a separate writing page each day this week, but he did do about 3 and chose to write sentences about Superman and Batman.

Both:
* Readings - Chapters 7-11 of Charlotte's Web (Charlotte has just made her first "Wilbur web") & Poetry (I Love Pussy & Mary's Lamb)
* World History - This week we learned all about the earliest people - nomads (Story of the World Ch. 1, map work, timeline & lapbook, along with readings from Usborne Book of World History (pg. 4-7) and Kingfisher History Encyclopedia (pg. 8)). We read You Wouldn't Want to be a Mammoth Hunter, It's Disgusting and We Ate It (a M/T favorite) and Little Grunt and Big Egg.  We also read tales from Hawaii, Jamaica and an African-American story from the US. From Children Just Like Me we read about Omar from Mexico, Carlos from New Mexico, Nicole from California, Taylor from New York, and Taryn from Illinois. Plus an end of the week test.
* Biology - We were all about habitats this week. We covered: 3 types of forests, both types of grasslands, two types of deserts & two types of tundra. We keep a habitat chart throughout the week that we updated daily after our readings. We learned the definition of habit and took an end of week test. We finished off our habitat study on Friday with a fun project: shoebox habitat dioramas!
* US History - We learned about the early life of Christopher Columbus. I added in readings from the Discovery of the Americas, First People, and A Day in the Life of a Native American to ensure that M/T had a complete view of the discovery of America. (Both M/T chose to start off their narration pages with "Columbus wasn't the first person to discover America." Made me so happy.) For our state study we learned all about Pennsylvania.

Lots of picture posts to follow! (Lots of pictures taken this week, so I thought it would be easier to just post the events separately.)