Holbrook Heroes: November Events

November came and went pretty quickly with a lot of stuff crammed into a little amount of time. We finished up our Ancient Egypt unit, focused on Thanksgiving, and really just tried to stay afloat with the excitement of the approaching holidays. I apologize for not staying on track with the blog. There has been just too much going on, and every time I've sat down to start it, something would pull me away from the computer. Before I knew it, we were 2 weeks away from Christmas. It's crazy! I'd say that my New Year's Resolutions should include staying on top of this thing, but I'm not sure I'd be able to keep that one. So, let's just say, I'll do my best to at least get everything we do posted in a somewhat reasonable amount of time. (I'll give myself a 3 month grace period.....Ha!).

So. In a nutshell, this is what we were able to accomplish for the month of November:

Reading:
Just so you know, a lot of what we did didn't get photographed this month. Our littlest member of the family is becoming more demanding when it comes to wanting attention and food, and it was all I could do just to get the lessons taught with Baby Riley hanging on my hip and trying to grab everything within reach (how quickly that starts to happen!).

However, both Hayden and Sawyer are doing really well with their reading. Hayden read his 10th book by the end of the month and got to pick out a new book from Barnes & Noble. Sawyer has read 4 books/shooooorrrrt stories in his Hooked on Phonics set. We're kind of stuck right now in our lessons because he's not looking at the whole word before he blurts out what he thinks it is (i.e. the word is 'map' but he says 'mat' because he looks at just the first letter and assumes that all the words are ending in -at).

Hooked on Phonics computer time.

Hooked on Phonics worked for me! Sawyer read his first "real" book!

Tracing color words with the right color crayon, a lesson from his Dear Dragon reader of the week.

Finding the letter Ii

Sight word practice: spell, stamp, decorate

Writing:
Actual writing assignments were pretty minimal this month. I figured we did enough writing in the other subjects, especially Hayden, that this would be enough. I don't fuss too much about proper handwriting skills (which some people may not agree with, but there you have it) because I personally don't feel that it's terribly important how they write the letters, as long as it's legible and the act of their writing is fluent. For example, Hayden insists on writing his lower case a's and o's by starting the circle at the bottom instead of at the top, and he forms the circle backwards to the way I was taught. I show him the write way to do it, and if he thinks hard enough about it, he'll do it correctly, but when he writes it his way, it's just as clearly written as if he'd done it correctly.

Glitter glue sight words - part 1

Glitter glue sight words - part 2

Math:
Math became a little more challenging for Hayden this month as we moved into larger numbers. The biggest mental block for him was probably figuring out how to align numbers with the ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands matching up properly.

Tens and Ones and Right Triangles - look at that mess of manipulatives!

Matching base 10 cards to Place Value Cards.

Stacking the numbers (from above)

Sliding the numbers into the correct position.

Writing the numbers correctly in his math journal after matching up the cards and stacking them.

I really thought I had more pictures than this. Sawyer actually did quite a bit of prewriting practice as well as math activities. I apparently didn't document them at all. He worked on sequencing for part of the month, putting things in the correct order, ordinal numbers, positional words, etc. Sorry for the lack of photos.

Thanksgiving:
Of course for the week of Thanksgiving, we changed things up a bit. We strayed from our usual curriculum and did some themed activities (which, honestly, we all enjoy a lot more than our regular stuff, but it's so much more work for me to do and I never have time to set it up properly to make it worth our while).

Hayden doing copywork to work on his handwriting.

Color the Sight Words on the turkey (both boys had this activity but different words)

Putting items under the correct numbered column.

Clipping the beginning letter sound of each picture shown.

Ancient Egypt:
This was a long time coming to finish. I can't believe I didn't take pictures of Hayden completing each of the mini books! *sigh* oh well. Here are pictures of the finished product at any rate. This is the first of all the lapbooks we've done that Hayden actually completed almost entirely on his own. That one reason it took so long for him to finish. You'll notice his handwriting is pretty crappy when he doesn't have lined paper to write on, but it improved as we went along. The Children's Games mini book was the first of the books he completed. The Story of Baby Moses was the last: