I forgot to do a week in review for two weeks ago, and then last week we had a weird schedule (took Monday off due to visiting grandparents, did all subjects Tuesday and Wednesday, only did a few subjects on Thursday afternoon due to a morning appointment and a sore arm from a flu shot, and went to a park day with our homeschool group on Friday!). So here are the last two weeks in review!
The "No Stinking Thinking Allowed" chalkboard came from a recent day of school when Caleb was constantly putting himself down for making mistakes. He'd struggle with a challenging word in his reader and say, "I'm terrible at this!" Or if he made a mistake in his math book he'd say, "This is too hard! I can't do it." I told him that was "stinkin' thinkin'" and he thought it was funny but I think it got the point across. :)
Reading: We continued to work in his Language Arts workbook; right now we're still in the parts of speech unit, so we did lots of practice with nouns, when to use "I" and "me," etc., and then moved on to verbs. We also started a new reader called A King on a Swing for further reading practice.
Spelling: We did Week 14 of his spelling curriculum the first week, and started Week 15 the next week, but only did half of it, so I decided to start over on Week 15 next time.
Handwriting: We continued to work in his Handwriting Workbook.
Vocabulary: During the last two weeks, our words were "fuss," "explore," "jolly," "snicker," "aim," "patient," "creep," and "drenched."
Math: We continued to work in his Horizons Math Workbook. He is almost done with the first workbook, so that means he's almost halfway done with first grade math!
Bible: We continued in His Mighty Warrior.
Read-Aloud: We started reading Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie. It's the original version of the story, so there's some big words in there and other things I have to explain to Caleb, but overall he's enjoying it.
Science: During these two weeks, we learned first about cells, then about molecules. The episodes of "The Magic School Bus" on these topics are fun and easy to understand. Since Caleb is in first grade and I didn't want to get too bogged down in these potentially confusing topics, we did a coloring page for the cell (though Caleb insisted I print out the page with the names of the parts of the cell on it!), and then for molecules we constructed simple models with mini marshmallows and toothpicks.
U.S. Geography: We learned about Tennessee. Caleb colored his Tennessee coloring page and we read a couple of books. One book was a story about the parade of ducks at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis! After we were done reading it, we looked up the history of the duck parade online to find out what was true and what was fiction. We saw photos and videos of the ducks, and also listened to the John Philip Sousa march "King Cotton" (that's the march the ducks waddle along with!).
We didn't get to Kentucky the second week, but it's just as well, since while I have library books checked out, I still hadn't nailed down a craft or activity to go along with Kentucky. I feel like lately I've been short-changing Caleb in our geography studies; I know I just need to make it fun and memorable for him, but the last few states might have been a little underwhelming for him. I want to get back to at least doing a craft or following a recipe or something!
My parents are visiting next week, so I think we'll take the week off and get back into it after that. I feel good about it, since we're technically ahead in our "important" subjects (reading and math), and following a pretty good pace for the others. I think worst case scenario, we'll get to April or May having a few states or "Magic School Bus" episodes leftover, and in that case we could still finish those over the summer since Caleb finds those subjects more fun than anything (he really only thinks of reading, math, handwriting, etc. as "school"!).
Links:
Cell Coloring Page (Homeschool Clipart)
Molecule Printable + Inspiration for Toothpick/Candy Molecules (One Project Closer)
