First, we welcomed our two and a half new students. Seth and Sam are in pre-kindergarten this year. They are following the Sonlight PreK4 program that Catherine and Chloe used. I am supplementing this with Singapore Math's Essential Math. Harrison is joining in for coloring and block play and whatever else he finds interesting.
Scripture: Boys: I will listen with my eyes, ears and heart.
Girls: Pay attention, my child, to what I say. Listen carefully. Proverbs 4:20
We started reading the Family-Time Bible by Kenneth Taylor.
Reading: The three girls studied a Reader's Theater script called "The Animal Trainer". They made puppets and performed it for the family.
We are reading a chapter a day from Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor as a group read aloud.
Social Studies:
- C&C - Working through a Scholastic book called Neighborhoods & Communities. They played charades, ten questions, and followed an errands list as they got better acquainted with maps and how they're used.
- Madelyn - Working through Map Skills: The United States (another Scholastic workbook). She has been studying a map of the United States finding similarities and differences among states. She's also working to learn all of the state capitals. I like how she organized her flash cards. I was quizzing her on the capital of Rhode Island. I hinted to her that it's another word for Heaven. She said, "p, p, Pittsburgh". I couldn't stop laughing.
Math: Unfortunately, all of our Singapore Math workbooks did not arrive in time to start the year. So, we continued with our Math Sprints from the summer. We hope to start our 2A and 4A work next week.
Writing:
- Madelyn - Completed Lessons 109 through 118 in Primary Language Lessons. She worked from this book throughout the summer and looks forward to finishing her lessons and starting a new writing program by October.
- C&C - After a botched order for the Wordly Wise program, I purchased Writing with Ease by Susan Wise Bauer to use with C&C. It's more aligned to what Madelyn is doing. They completed the Year 1 placement/assessment tasks this week and will begin Year 2 next week.
We are studying the earth. We did some reading about the Earth from the DK Eyewitness Series and completed labs from Janice VanCleave's Earth Science for Every Kid. We have learned that the Earth is made of an inner core, outer core, mantle and crust. The children pretended to be geologists and learned to identify limestone, conduct a mineral streak test, and did core sampling. We are also growing a salt bed and crystals. We are planning some field trips supporting this for next week.
When we conducted an experiment showing how metamorphic rocks are made using pressure, the kids piled on top of each other in their own layers and said, "Look Mom, we're metamorphic rocks."
