Holbrook Heroes: Dem bones, Dem bones...

Week 2 of March was shortened by Sawyer's unfortunate monkey bars event that resulted in a broken arm. Hardly anything happened after that incident other than running from one doctor's office to another to get x-rays, follow-ups, and a sling. Not even a cast! After all the drama and pain and stress, it turns out that the fracture is too high up on his arm for them to cast, and he has to just "keep it still" in the sling for 4 weeks before we get it x-rayed again. Yeah, right. Keep it still. You'd think these pediatric doctors have never worked with highly active children before. Needless to say, he hurt himself another 4 times before I finally made a trip to Walgreens to purchase a stretchy Ace bandage. This better secured his arm, and we have had no problems since then. So, for the next 4 weeks, when you see pictures of Sawyer with this wrap around him, now you'll know why.

Language Arts:

Books We Read this week:
Helen at Home and the Letter H by Klingel and Noyed
Dear Dragon Helps Out by Margaret Hillert
I Did It, Dear Dragon by Margaret Hillert
Rooster is Off to See the World by Eric Carle
Jo and the Foal (Emergent Reader with Hayden's curriculum)

Hayden read through his emergent reader aloud for Sawyer

Riley got interested in one of Hayden's books.

Sawyer read aloud the "I Did it, Dear Dragon".
Afterwards, we began the next book together.

The boys cut out and played a memory game with some sight words.

They each had their own set of words to work with.

After cutting them out, we arranged them facedown on the table and took turns
flipping them over, reading the words aloud, and trying to find a match.

This is a book that Hayden picked out at the library this week for his own
reading pleasure. Looks interesting enough from the front cover, I suppose.

But then, you look at the inside. What the heck??
It's a scientist in the making, I guess. He loves these books. Me? I was
reading Ramona Quimby at his age. Hahaha!

A little close-up of one of the passages that he read to me.
At this rate, he'll know more about reproduction than I'll ever care to cover
with him!

Sawyer, meanwhile, is circling all the H's he can find. :)

Back to reading skills…… Looking for and identifying punctuation in one of
his books for the week.

There were a LOT of periods.

Math:

Playing the Corners Game:
Each card has 4 numbers in 4 different colors. You have to
match numbers/colors up so that the numbers together make
a sum of 5, 10, 15, or 20. The first one to 100 is the winner.

Working on learning the value of coins (pennies, nickels, and dimes).

Understanding what "half" of something is.

After showing him what half is and isn't, Sawyer had to cut out a bunch of
shapes and then fold them in half.

It was a lot of shapes. So, I helped out a little.

He didn't do a bad job in the folding, though!

Social Studies:

This week, for our study of Australia, we made a map cookie! I found the idea here. It took a lot longer than I expected, and our cookie dough wasn't entirely cooperative, but below shows our results.

We put our map worksheets inside sheet protectors first. Then, the boys rolled
out the dough to cover the continent.

We had to squish it, playdoh style, to move it back just inside the line of the
country/continent.

Which proved to be a big waste of time since our cookie dough grew exponentially in the oven. I ended up cutting out the map, laying it on top of the cookie, and trimming the cookies with a paring knife. The boys liked this because they got to eat the excess pieces.

Once the cookies were looking more like the country/continent of Australia again,
the boys got to pick and choose their toppings that would represent certain cities
and other places of importance.