Christmas and End of the First Semester

Okay, I need to wrap this stuff up.  Enough already!  We are about to start our 2nd semester of school.  So, I need to finish up all this blogging from before Christmas before that happens or I'm going to be behind before we even get started!

The last of our schooling before Christmas was obviously focused on the holiday.  It was more fun than work (I think and hope) and it passed the time quickly rather than having the boys pacing around restlessly waiting for the Big Day to arrive!

Reading:

Holiday Syllable Sort.  The boys colored Christmas pictures, cut them out, and glued them under the correct column depending on the number of syllables each picture was (i.e. Santa is 2 syllables...)

Snowball Digraph Sorting Activity.  Hayden doesn't seem to get these just yet.  So, I thought we'd work on them a little bit.  He did well with it, but I think we're going to go back to working on just short and long vowel sounds.  I got ahead of myself in teaching him this stuff, and he's getting short e and short i sounds confused.  So, better to get it right before moving on...

Sawyer got interested and wanted to do this too.  He did pretty well with it!

Sawyer doing do-a-dot markers on the letter S to help Santa find Rudolph.

Math:

A little Christmas tree feltboard puzzle I let Sawyer do while Hayden and I
worked on math.  It was very puzzling for him.....

Christmas tree Fact Family Forest in the making.  We did a couple of these
each day this week.  I gave him 3 numbers in a family (i.e. 1, 3, & 4) and he
had to make the 2 addition and 2 subtraction sentences that went with those
numbers.  Then, he colored his trees.  

At the end of the week, he glued all his Fact Family trees onto a big sheet
of white construction paper, and he made a Fact Family Forest, complete
with a river running through it!

Sawyer did a little math on the computer.

 Spelling/Writing:
Hayden worked on his spelling words this week by putting them in ABC order, doing a Rainbow Roll and Spell, and using Scrabble tiles to "add up his words".  He got all but one word right on his spelling test!

Scrabble Add-it-Up

Snowman Hangman - another spelling word/sight word activity.  We did this
last year, too.  The snowman loses a piece of himself every time you pick a
letter that isn't in the word.

Books we read this week:
The Velveteen Rabbit
If You Take a Mouse to the Movies
Pocket's Christmas Wish
Oh! What a Christmas!
The Berenstain Bears' Christmas Tree
Christmas Magic
The Christmas Magic 

 And Hayden's reader this week was: Merry Christmas, Dear Dragon.