Letters to my kids: Our first week

One of my main reasons for blogging is to keep track of our adventures. I'm looking forward to looking back to see what we have learned and how we've adjusted. Here is a general synopsis of our first week.

I wanted to make the first day of school very special. The kids were excited about their new supplies and couldn't wait for the day to start. Luke requested coffee cake for breakfast, so I found an apple coffee cake (after all, Ben's letter of the week was "A") and prepared it the night before.

The boys loved the coffee cake and were excited to start the first day of school!

Olivia was not quite as impressed!

We started off well. I had decided to do the more intensive work first while he was still fresh. I always prefer to get the hard work out of the way before starting the fun stuff, so I assumed that he would, also. He completed two pages of Explode the Code, got halfway through his copywork, and then melted. "This is not what I expected!!!" he cried.

Uh-oh.

We pushed through the rest of his sit-down work and moved onto the fun stuff. We both enjoy science and had fun reading about the water cycle and watching a song on You-tube to help the boys remember the stages. Good news - they remember and understand the song. Evaporation, condensation and precipitation are now part of their vocabularies. Bad news- The song is ridiculously catchy and they won't stop singing it!

After we finished all of our work, we sat down to discuss the meltdown. I decided to give Luke input on how to arrange his schedule. He said that he likes working on the sit-down work first so that he can get it finished. We also decided that writing his schedule on a white board and erasing tasks as they were completed would really help us both. Once he realized that school was both work and fun, our entire week changed for the better.

By Thursday, Luke realized that if he worked hard during school time,
we would have time for special things, like a trip to the park!

Here are some of the highlights from our week (I'll post math, phonics and history photos next time):

Music - We borrowed Peter and the Wolf from our library today and have already listened to it twice. All three kids really seem to love it and the boys started to recognize which instruments represented each character. We also tried going to a free outdoor folk concert. It wasn't quite to the kids' liking, but we enjoyed spending time with my parents and it provided an opportunity to introduce a new word into Luke's vocabulary - preferences.

Ben enjoying the music with his Yogi.

Art - Color Wheel - The boys learned about primary colors and mixed paints to make secondary and intermediate colors. All three kids loved breaking out our new paints!

Nature - An unexpected lesson on cicadas - We found a cicada that had very recently molted. Luke observed it and drew a picture of both the cicada and the molted skin. We researched them and found out that they spend most of their nymph life underground until they dig out and shed their skin (several times). They're the loudest insect and if one were to get into your ear, you could actually lose your hearing. After reading this, Luke insisted on covering his ears whenever we went near it. We also learned that they are a favorite of squirrels and decided that ours had picked a really lousy place to molt because it was on a bright blue portion of Olivia's play set underneath a tree that is home to a family of fighting squirrels.

Handwriting/ Art - We began using Draw Write Now twice a week.

Ben joined in for the fun. He drew everything by himself
except for the blue lines.

Luke

In Language Arts, we discussed using capital letters at the beginning of sentences and for the first letter of a proper name. We completed this sheet together. Luke had to decide if each word would begin with a capital or lowercase letter.