The Pretty Life: ivey league kindergarten: week in review!

This week we covered a lot of ground in our Hooked on Phonics program....Caleb seems to be mostly over his reading jitters and is a lot more confident! We moved on to words with the short "U" sound (-un, -ut, -ug, -up, etc.) and added some more "helper words" as well, such as "see," "with," and "says." He faltered a little bit today when we were reviewing everything; he was the one who had chosen the pace this week ("let's do some more!") but I wanted to make sure it all stuck. After confusing a few of the word families, Caleb figured it out again. I've found it helps to start each day reviewing a little bit of what we did before, plus he still likes reading sentences I write on our dry erase board:

I need to write down all the word families and "helper words" Caleb has learned so we can find more ways to fit them in. One funny "real world" instance of how important the right word is: we saw a commercial on TV where a wife was asking her husband for a MUG, but he couldn't understand her because she was calling out to him from their tiny kitchen and it was noisy in there. He entered the kitchen and gave his wife a nice HUG, and then went into the next room again. Caleb thought it was hilarious, and I think it helped to remind him that those words rhyme because they came from the same word family.

We finished Mr. Popper's Penguins this week too. Caleb loves the part where Mr. Popper uses the telephone to ask about whether he needs some kind of license for his pet penguin; he ends up being misunderstood by many operators, who get his name wrong repeatedly ("Mr. Popwell?" "Mr. Topper?") and end up transferring him to someone in the automobile license department. So Caleb drew Mr. Popper with an "exasperated face" and I helped him draw the phone.

We did several math lessons this week too. Caleb can now write his numbers from 1 to 30, and is getting so much better with adding.

We didn't get to Bible lessons this week (oops), but we did do a little science. Caleb saw something about the different types of clouds on Curious George, so he asked if we could learn more about it. I found a neat online video about the four major types of clouds (Caleb has watched it at least five times in the last two days!), and then we made models of the different types using cotton balls and glue.

We also peeked outside that day to see what kind of clouds were in the sky. They were low and covered a lot of the sky so we decided we were looking at stratus clouds right then. Cirrus clouds happen on sunny days and are those wispy ones that are way up high, cumulus clouds are the fluffy ones you see all the shapes in, and cumulonimbus clouds are the tall, dark, "angry" clouds that are often accompanied by thunderstorms or tornadoes (Caleb drew those in, as well as the rain under the stratus clouds and the sun near the cirrus clouds). It was a fun activity and I ended up learning right along with Caleb, since it has been many years since I learned about cloud types and have since forgotten most of it!

This was our verse for the week: