The First of May

The last week of April/first week of May is bringing us the summer heat, and with it, more and more of a desire to be outside playing in it.  Our "school year" will be coming to a close (more or less) pretty soon.  This week, we focused on our Magic Treehouse book, Tonight on the Titanic, and I added a few other little math and language arts in there as well.  So, I'll start off with the latter.

Language Arts
It was mostly Sawyer who had a little redirection for his language arts lessons.  We started reading the next Dear Dragon book, Dear Dragon Goes to the Library, since Hayden's reading and writing was about the Titanic.

Handwriting without Tears - Practicing the letter S.

Working on plurals that are formed from the singular words ending in a consonant -y.

Look at that pencil grip!!!

Enjoying some independent free time in his Learning Skills workbook,
coloring the biggest (or smallest) item in each box.

Math:

We did one day of math with the Treehouse books, and another day or two of math in our regular curriculum.  This is our regular curriculum:

Sawyer counted stationary objects using tally marks.

And he worked on partitioning the numbers 5 and 10.

Hayden mostly did some review.  

On the top problem, he had to group 24 circles in a way that someone could tell how many were there
without having to count each and every one of them.  The thought was that he would put them in groups
of fives because that's how he's been learning to "see" numbers on the abacus.  Instead, he grouped them
in 4 rows of 6.  Which actually kind of makes sense.  The second one, I guess he was still on the "4
groups of 6" mindset.

Magic Treehouse:

The rest of the week was devoted to Tonight on the Titanic.  Hayden read the book aloud, 2 chapters each day, while the rest of us listened.  Then, we did a series of activities that revolved around this historical event.....

Hayden reads while Sawyer listens and Riley plays the LeapPad.

Nonfiction (mostly) books that we used for researching.

Searching the books for answers to our questions about the Titanic.

Hayden learned how to write down the information he finds when researching a subject.

Looking for the publisher and the copyright date of the book.

Putting together envelopes to form an accordion book of "unsinkable facts".

Glueing down a fact to each envelope.

Hayden's finished book of six unsinkable facts!

Sequencing the events of the Titanic and matching the clock faces to each one.

Sorry.  Couldn't resist the silly face.

Sawyer taking his turn on matching up the clock to the correct digital time.

A lesson and experiment on icebergs.

Why do they float?  

Hayden's "iceberg"

Only a teeny part of the icebergs show above the surface of the water!

The more, the merrier!

Going with the ice theme, we made watercolor ice paints.

And we painted with them!  (Outside of course).

Baby hand trying to paint as well. 

The boys' finished products.

Then, using a pencil coat rack that we found at Goodwill and a water heater box,
we made.....

A mini Titanic! (or pirate ship - whatever).

From the book I showed last week, this is the portion of the punch-out Titanic that we've gotten done.
Actually, it was way too difficult for the boys to do.  Very delicate, easy to tear, and the tabs are super tiny and all have to be glued.  So, they watch me do it instead.  

And so ends our unit on Magic Treehouse Book #17!  Next week, it's Buffalo Before Breakfast!