Our first 8 weeks of school went pretty successfully, if I do say so myself. We are now on a 2-week long break. We will start a new set of 8 weeks next Monday after our little breather. This year, we started a few things differently. Hayden and Sawyer are working separately on their math and language arts in the mornings. Here is what each boy has done so far:
Hayden's LA and Math
Hayden began the
Red Book of Learning Language Arts Through Literature (LLATL) over the summer which equates with 2nd grade level of reading. Some of the lessons he did this session included poetry, learning new phonics sounds (ck as in truck, y as in hurry, etc), facts and opinions, plural nouns, context words, -ing words, and more. I don't have many pictures from his language arts lessons because a lot of it is reading, discussing, and other activities that aren't very exciting as far as pictures go.
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| Working on contractions. |
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| Phonics Barn: ar words (as in hard) and or words (as in short). |
Books/Stories Hayden read aloud this 8 weeks:
Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik
* What Will Little Bear Wear?
* Birthday Soup
* Little Bear Goes to the Moon
* Little Bear's Wish
All Around the Farm (1st of the LLATL readers)
* Will Little Sparrow Fly?
* Hard, Short Hay
For math, Hayden is continuing the
Right Start Math Level C which is also comparable to 2nd grade level. He has been working on subtraction, counting money and making change, and more subtraction.
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Using the abacus and graph paper to understand trading from cents to dollars
and write money amounts using decimal points. |
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| Worksheet on making change. |
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| Practicing subtraction facts with the minuends 10 or less by playing "Difference War". |
Sawyer's LA and Math
Because Sawyer seemed to be enjoying the Dear Dragon books so much, I decided to keep reading those and building lesson plans off of them. We've pretty much exhausted the books at this point now, though, and in the next 8 weeks, we will be moving on to the LLATL Blue Book. Some things that Sawyer worked on this time were: vocabulary words, letter sounds and writing letters correctly, text comprehension, opposites, and compound words.
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Rainbow writing activity: After painting, he came up with an wrote a metaphor on
each color of the rainbow (ex: "as red as fire"). |
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| Reading "Where's Baby's Belly Button?" to his little brother. |
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| Assembling a puzzle of opposites. |
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| Writing in an alphabet workbook. |
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| Creating compound words out of smaller words. |
Books/Stories that Sawyer read this 8 weeks:
What's in the Sky, Dear Dragon? by Margaret Hillert
What's in the Pond, Dear Dragon? by Margaret Hillert
What's in the Woods, Dear Dragon? by Margaret Hilert
Dear Dragon Goes to the Bank by Margaret Hillert
It's Bedtime, Dear Dragon by Margaret Hillert
For math, Sawyer continued the Right Start Math Level A which is comparable to the kindergarten level. He is now a little over halfway through it. To date, he has worked on graphing colors, the commutative property, counting by fives, tens, & twos, partitioning teens, and the position of the hour numbers on a clock & the o'clock positions.
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| Constructing a graph showing colors. |
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| Making piles of 10 with two colors. |
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| Placing hour cards around the clock. |
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| Reading the o'clocks. |
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| Putting the clocks in order and matching digital time to the analog time. |
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| Sawyer's MathSeeds certificate of completion. He finished the whole series of maps! |
Weather
This was our science unit for the past 8 weeks. Some of it didn't work out so well because the weather didn't cooperate with us. It never rained for one thing. It wasn't until way after we finished up that it actually started raining around here. But, oh well, part of the learning experience, I suppose! Using the Smithsonian Science Education Center weather curriculum as our guide, we explored clouds, wind, temperature, and more. We kept mini notebooks throughout the unit as well.
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| Observing the weather with our senses. |
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Egg experiment. Will the egg fry on the sidewalk or the cast iron skillet faster?
Answer: Neither since the sun decided to hide behind a bunch of clouds the moment
we started our experiment! |
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| Sun prints on solar paper |
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| End result before the blue of the paper darkened. |
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| Creating a cloud. |
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| What do we know about clouds?? |
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| Making wind flags. |
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| Recording the outside temperature in our notebooks. |
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| Comparing hot and cold water temperatures. |
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Learning about color and temperature. One thermometer was placed in a black sleeve,
and the other was placed in a white sleeve. Both were set out in the sun for about 10
minutes, and then the results were recorded. |
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Our weather calendar.
Each day, we observed and recorded the cloud coverage, wind speed, and precipitation. |
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| Marking down the temperature of the day. |
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| Testing out rainy day fabrics. |
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| Recording our observations. |
Books we read for Weather:
The Cloud Book by Tomie dePaola
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett
Twister on Tuesday by Mary Pope Osborne
I Face the Wind by Vicki Cobb
Air is All Around You by Franklyn Branley
Water Everywhere! by Christin Taylor Butler
Meteorologists Tools by Anders Hanson
Why is it Raining? by Judith Williams
Basket Time
This was something new we started this year. It's probably the boys' favorite part of the school day. A friend of mine introduced me to the concept of this activity, and it works great for fitting in the little things that I'd like to do each day but can't seem to find the time to. During basket time, we rotate between history, geography, art, music, reading aloud, and other extracurricular activities. Here is what we did for the first 8 weeks:
Ancient Times
In this history curriculum, the boys learned about what history and archaeology are, who the first nomads were, and a little about the ancient Egyptians.
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| Making cave paintings. |
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| Model of the Nile River. |
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| Planting grass seeds along the banks of the Nile River. |
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| Preparing to flood the Nile. |
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| Admiring their handiwork. |
Our grass seeds did grow, but not really as planned. The boys were supposed to "flood" the river once a week. However, our rainy Florida weather caught us off guard more than once, and our river flooded way more than it was intended to. No photograph of the end result, unfortunately, but the boys enjoyed it all the same.
Books we read for Story of the World:
Me and My Family Tree by Joan Sweeney
Little Grunt and the Big Egg by Tomie dePaola
Ms. Frizzle's Adventures in Ancient Egypt by Joanna Cole
Archaeologists Dig for Clues by Kate Duke
Egyptian Gods and Goddesses by Henry Barker
Madeleine in London by Ludwig Bemelmans
Other Basket Time Activities
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| Crushing chalk to mix with egg yolk to make paint Giotto di Bondone style. |
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| Painting with our homemade egg paint. |
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| Creating life size human bodies with organs to learn about the human anatomy. |
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| Attempting a Florentine relief with cardboard, aluminum foil, and black tempera paint. |
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| Paper plate model of the human cell. |
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| Paper plate model of the human cell. |
Read Aloud Time
Hayden's Books: Sawyer's Books:
Should I Share My Ice Cream? by Mo Willems
Elephants Cannot Dance! by Mo Willems
Today I will Fly! by Mo Willems
A Circle in the Sky by Zachary Wilson
A Tooth is Loose by Lisa Trumbauer
Out the Door by Catherine Matthias
The Little Red Hen by Sandy Damashek
OK Kids - a BOB Book
Hooray for Fly Guy by Tedd Arnold
0-10 - a BOB Book
Watch Me Throw the Ball by Mo Willems
The Red Hen - a BOB Book
Think Before You Act by Regina G. Burch
Happy Pig Day by Mo Willems
The Paper Bag Princess by Rober Munsch
My Friend is Sad by Mo Willems
I Am Invited to a Party by Mo Willems
Let's Go For a Drive by Mo Willems
And so ends our first 8 weeks of school!
