Math - We read two books today for our living math day. The first one was Counting with Sebastian Pig and Friends on the Farm. We practiced counting by 2's, 5's and 10's and finding the silly cow on each page. The kids are really enjoying this series so we will get the rest of them from the library. The other book we read was about measuring and counting and mentioned the Northern Lights, which Ladybug and Sunshine and I learned about this week. It was called Sizing Up Winter. I actually really liked that one. The illustrations are really interesting. There's a depth to them that makes you want to try to pick them off the page.
Reading - All About Reading is full steam ahead here. Sunshine always wanted to go first on reading any words - flashcards, fluency sheet, sentences, whatever, it didn't matter. With some encouragement, Ladybug is now volunteering to go first which gets Sunshine all "fwustrated." It's good for him though, and for her. I just have to make sure I keep track of who has gone first when so they even out pretty well. Today with Sunshine and Ladybug, we read a story called "The Tub" about two monkeys who take turns playing with their toys in a tub of water. One thing that really impresses me about All About Reading is that it brings in other subjects and real life experiences. Okay, not the monkeys playing in the tub, but we had the opportunity to locate Costa Rica on the map. The other kids have also located places on the map, talked about dialects, and discussed idioms. It's not just reading the words on the page, but also making real world connections. After Sunshine and Ladybug read the story, we used pictures to retell the story.
In Chicklette's reading today, we talked about the cowboy dialect and read a story about a very un-cowboy cowboy. It was pretty funny and within the first couple pages she had Turtle, Racer, and Ladybug crowding around and listening in.
Turtle's reading was pretty easy today. We just reviewed a bunch of EE words and talked about contractions, which he has already studied in grammar, so it was just a review for him.
I found out today that My Tech High will pay for Racer can take Part 2 of his BYU English class if he finishes by January so now we have something to push for.
Spelling - Racer and Chicklette both passed off all their words today. Turtle is still struggling with the word student but we were able to find his error and correct it. He also did great on remembering his little hints he made up to remember the correct spelling of his other words. I still am struggling to know how to teach him best with spelling. It's not his best subject.
Latin - Racer and I are still struggling through his Latin class. I try to help as much as possible and with my Spanish background I can pick up some stuff but it's pretty slow going. I like the Memoria Press Latin series much better than this current BYU class, but we'll keep working at it. He had a real setback last week with an important test in that class and it taught him the value of actually studying. He's been making flashcards to work with and they are helping. Chicklette and Turtle did their review questions and translation on Lesson 10 in Prima Latina.
History - I am loving history right now. It's all about the beginnings of England. We've talked about the Viking invasion and Alfred the Great. We looked up Salisbury Plain since that's where Alfred starting pushing back the Vikings and found out that the English military uses part of it as a training ground. Racer continued looking up some information about Alfred and found out that he was a great military leader. Today we talked about the Battle of Hastings between William the Conqueror and Harold the Unfortunate. (Guess who won?) The kids are starting to get opinions on how well the rulers we are studying governed and about the state of affairs at the time. It's really starting to get fun and get some good discussions going. The mapwork from Story of the World really ties all the things we learn together and places them in a concrete sphere. The book recommendations in our text have been spot on also. Lots of good Viking texts the last two weeks.
Science - Racer, Turtle, Chicklette and I learned about chestnut trees today and we learned that Versailles has something like 18,500 chestnut trees. We also learned that chestnuts are quite starchy and full of vitamin C. That got the kids looking up chestnut trees and buying one. They really want one, but I can't see a place for one in our yard. They get huge. And we would need more than one for proper pollination. It would be fun though and our text said that in Europe long ago that chestnuts were a main source of food for medieval people. Maybe this holiday season I can get my hands on some chestnuts and we can try roasting them or in one of the other many recipes.
Till next time from our crazy, loud house.
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