ivey league kindergarten: weeks in review

Here's what we did for the past few weeks!

Caleb continues to make great progress in Hooked on Phonics.  He learned pl-, gr-, fr-, br-, cr-, pr-, dr-, qu-, and tr- over the past couple of weeks.  During that time we did plenty of review by reading sentences.  He also earned three more stars on his reading chart!

We finished Otis Spofford by Beverly Cleary.  Caleb enjoyed it but he wasn't into illustrating his book report that day.  His favorite part of the book was where Otis gets into trouble for firing off spitballs, so his punishment is to sit in the back of the classroom by himself and fire spitballs into the trashcan.  So Caleb's drawing is of a giant spitball. :)

In math, we continued to work on adding and telling time.  The workbook also introduced the idea of volume, as well as the half dollar.

We also started Handwriting Without Tears to give Caleb more handwriting practice and to help him learn how to better write his lowercase letters.  The kindergarten workbook starts with uppercase letters, and groups them together according to form and where you put your pencil down to start.  We started with the "frog jump capitals" (F, E, D, and so on), which all start at the upperleft corner of the box and then your pencil "jumps" back up to form the rest of the letter.  We finished up the remainder of the uppercase letters than start in the upperleft corner (such as H, K, L, U, etc.) and will start the curvier letters like C and O next!

Caleb also did some art one day, and we made a "gratitude garland" the day before Thanksgiving!

Links:
I Can Listen to Stories printable (Kinder Craze)
Gratitude Garland printable (Something Simple)

ivey league kindergarten: weeks in review

Here's what happened over the last two weeks!

Big news...Caleb finished Workbook 1 of Horizons Math!  We did 80 math lessons in three months, so not too shabby!

Caleb caught on to skip-counting by 2's pretty quickly, and he continues to improve with telling time and counting coins.  Workbook 2 also has 80 lessons in it, so depending on our pace, Caleb might finish kindergarten earlier than anticipated.

In reading, Caleb learned sw-, st-, fl-, gl-, cl-, and bl-.  He also earned a few more stars on his reading chart by reading HOP stories and books.

We didn't get to much Bible unfortunately...I think I might have to revamp our approach a bit.  We've realized that Caleb knows a lot of Bible stories but doesn't necessarily see them as more than that.  I might try more of a character/virtue approach where we learn about a specific trait (such as bravery, faith, compassion, etc.), and then find people in the Bible that demonstrated that trait, verses that talk about it, and then find ways to apply it in our own lives.

Caleb found lots of leaves outside and asked if we could do rubbings of them, so we did that one day (we had to give them a day to dry out...we've had so much rain lately that the leaves were pretty damp at first!).

We finished The Mouse and the Motorcycle.  Caleb liked it a lot.  He didn't really want to draw a picture of the story but he did a little bit anyway!

For our next read-aloud, Caleb chose Otis Spofford, also by Beverly Cleary.  He really liked the Ramona character in the Henry Huggins books we read, so we might check some more Cleary books out of the library in the future since we don't have much in the way of Ramona.  :)

One morning, Caleb got out some of his old preschool work and reminisced.  :)

And finally, Caleb's first experience with trick-or-treating!  He still loves Spiderman but said he wanted to be the Hulk for Halloween.  He had a blast, but after awhile he said his costume was too hot and he ended up back home in his normal clothes helping me hand out the candy.

One other thing I'm looking into is better handwriting practice.  I let it go for awhile since he was bored with worksheets I got off the internet, but I think if I got Handwriting Without Tears or something like that he would like it more.  I've heard mixed advice about handling handwriting in kindergarten...some moms say to wait, others say they wish they hadn't waited since they're still having to work on handwriting in the later grades.  Caleb can write all his numbers (thanks to math), and pretty much all of his letters, but I'm not sure he knows how to write lowercase (or else, he doesn't bother, since I see him writing mostly in uppercase).  I feel like we need to do a little more than just reading and math so I'll probably add more writing soon.