But for now, I'll recap our schooling at home.
Hayden
Hayden finished up the first of his readers (All Around the Farm) in his Learning Language Arts Through Literature curriculum, passed the assessment of that section, and began the first story in his second reader. Here are a few of the activities that he did:
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| Put pictures from one of the stories in the order in which they occurred, and wrote a sentence about each one. |
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| Discussed real vs. make believe. Then chose a pair of pictures (one real, one make believe) and wrote 2 sentences about each one. |
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| Compound words |
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| Word Family Flip Books |
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| Wrote a story based on a picture. |
Hound Dog Takes the Job by Yuriko Nichols
Cat Visits the Town by Yuriko Nichols
Cat Was Wrong by Yuriko Nichols
The Best Work in the World by Yuriko Nichols
The Bravest Dog Ever by Natalie Standiford
The Fire Cat by Esther Averill
A Stitch in Time by Yuriko Nichols
For math, Hayden worked more on subtraction for a while. Then we moved on to problem solving, and measuring perimeters and lengths. He also learned how to draw diagonals using a T-square and a 30-60 triangle.
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| Playing subtraction games |
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| Working on perimeter problems |
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| Subtraction Word Problems |
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| Drawing horizontal and vertical lines using a T-square. |
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| Review and practice worksheet |
Sawyer began using the blue book in Learning Language Arts Through Literature this 8 weeks of school. We did the first couple of lessons, and then skipped to the first assessment and on to Lesson 9 which was more his speed. Here are a few of the activities that Sawyer worked on:
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| The Lion and the Mouse "sequence of events" story folder. |
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| Searching out letter sounds. |
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| Finding words with whatever ending sound I told him. |
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| Fun stacking the caps after reading Caps for Sale. |
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| Getting help from Hayden reading words and having a spelling bee of sorts. |
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| Grouping words with the same last ending sound. |
Who Took the Farmer's Hat? by Joan L. Nodset
The Lion and the Mouse by Aesop
Nat Ran, Ann Ran (LLATL reader)
The Fat Cat (LLATL reader)
Quin and the Quiz (LLATL reader)
Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina
Oh! What is on the Rug! (LLATL reader)
Mr. Rabbits Thanksgiving Dinner (Story Folder in LLATL)
Sawyer completed his Right Start Math Level A book this 8 weeks. It was very rewarding for him to be able to say that he's completed 77 lessons in math, close that book, and move on to the next one. This last 8 weeks, he worked on telling time, measuring lengths, weight, & volume, tessalations, fractions, and beginning geometry.
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| Writing down hours on a clock. |
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| Matching digital to analog times. |
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| Putting the clocks in order. |
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| Lining up paper strips in order from longest to shortest. |
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| Using different units of measurement to measure out the strips. |
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| Matching same length strips. |
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| Measuring the weights of tiles to compare and calculate missing weights for balancing. |
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| Determining the missing amounts. |
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| Comparing volumes of water in different sized containers. |
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| Putting together a fraction puzzle. |
Basket time has turned out to be a great time for us. The boys love taking turns reading aloud, and of course, we are always having fun activities during this time. We switch around subjects weekly to keep it interesting as well as to allow us to cover all that we want to cover without feeling overwhelmed. The subjects that we were able to cover this 8 weeks were: Story of the World, China in World Geography, and Human Anatomy.
Books We Read During Basket Time
Hayden:
Go Dog Go by P.D. Eastman
Put Me in the Zoo by Robert Lopshire
Flying Giants by Monica Hughes
Eddie Elephant's Exciting Egg Sitting by Barbara de Rubertis
Magic School Bus and the Case of the Missing Bones by Eva Moore (chapter book)
Sawyer:
Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss
Just a Little Sick by Mercer Mayer
Going to the Firehouse by Mercer Mayer
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura J. Numeroff
Dear Dragon Goes Camping by Margaret Hillert
The Foot Book by Dr. Seuss
It's Fall, Dear Dragon by Margaret Hillert
I'm a Frog! by Mo Willems
Human Anatomy
We talked about the nervous and circulatory systems this set of 8 weeks. The boys learned about how the cerebrospinal fluid protects the brain by performing an egg experiment and how neurons transmit messages to each other. They also learned the 4 main components of blood, what their functions are, and how blood is pumped by the heart.
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| After shaking his "brain" without the protection of cerebrospinal fluid, it was obliterated. |
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| Sawyer's "brain" stayed intact even after falling from enormous heights because it DID have cerebrospinal fluid to protect it from slamming against the "skull". |
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| That didn't stop him from trying over and over to crack the brain. |
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| Using dots as the "neurons" and different colored pencils to draw lines connecting the "neurons" to each other, the boys could get an idea of how many messages their neurons transmit to others. |
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| Filling in a worksheet on the 4 main components of blood. |
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| This was our model of a heart pump. By pushing down on the balloon stretched across the top, it created a vacuum, pushing the water/blood up the straw and out to the "next chamber". |
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| The boys created a model of blood using different items as the parts of blood: corn syrup for plasma, red hots for red blood cells, lima beans for white blood cells, and lentils for the platelets. |
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| We mixed up the 4 parts together. After the blood sat on our mantle for a while, the red hots gave the corn syrup a reddish tint, similar to how the red blood cells seem to tint our plasma. |
Story of the World
Our time with Story of the World was pretty minimal this 8 weeks. Our selection of activities/projects didn't go as planned, and I ended up forfeiting most of my ideas and doing map studies instead. Most of what we read about had to do with Ancient Egypt anyway, which we studied in depth just last year.
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| We located Egypt and Sumer, the countries where people first learned to write, and we traced the Nile River. We also marked where Cheop's Great pyramid and the Sphinx were built. |
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| On another map, we relocated Sumer after reading more about the Sumerians and how the country was made up of city-states. We read about Sargon floating down the Euprates River, then traced the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. |
World Geography
China was our country to study this time. We learned a lot about the Chinese New Year, the zodiac, their music, and their food.
Books We Read:
Children Just Like Me (pg. 48) by Barnabas and Anabel Kindersley
Count Your Way To China by Jim Haskins
Lon Po Po by Ed Young
My First Chinese New Year by Karen Katz
Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel
Marco Polo for Kids by Janis Herbert
Ms. Frizzles Adventures: Imperial China by Joanna Cole
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| We listened to this lady play the pipa. The boys were not fond of the sound this instrument made, but it was still pretty impressive the way she played it. |
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| Then we listened to this 14 year old girl play what I think is the guzheng. It sounded very similar to the hammered dulcimer except that she plucked and strummed the strings with her fingers. We liked this one better than the other! |
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| We made paper lanterns decorated with dragons. |
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| We painted our names in Chinese in the style of calligraphy. |
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| I actually wrote the symbols in pencil on the paper, and they traced them with the black paint. |
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| Finished names: Sawyer's on the left and Hayden's on the right |
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| Figuring out our zodiac animal signs. Sawyer was disappointed to find out that he is a rat. Not the pig as he was hoping. Hahaha! |
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| Hayden discovered he is a dog. Loyal and good natured. :) |
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| We had some typical Chinese-American food: spring rolls and pot stickers. |
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| We made Chinese stir-fried rice and beef & broccoli for dinner. We found these kid chopsticks in the Asian market down the road from our house. That place was so much fun to go into! |
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And so ends our second 8 weeks of school!
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