Week 17- Routine Feels Good

After doing minimal school last week, I think we all enjoyed getting back to our normal routine.  We worked hard to catch-up from last week.  Even though I know from my years of classroom teaching that most classes never finish their textbooks each year, I still plan to finish all of ours this year.  I'm hoping that we can still make our goal of finishing during the first week of June, but I'm willing to go beyond if needed.

Math
Luke has been finishing up his unit on subtraction up to 20.  He understands the concepts, but now we have to buckle down and work on memorizing the actual facts.  Hopefully, memorization with make math go by faster.  Luckily, we're heading into units on shapes, length, and weight, so we can add practicing facts into the mix.  I need to work on finding some games that will make him believe that he isn't working.  One of his assignments this week was to complete "magic triangles".  I created little markers that he could move around so that he wouldn't have to keep erasing.  This was a good practice in "stick-to-it-iveness" which is always needed . . .

Proud that he figured out his first triangle

 

 Reading
Luke made great strides in reading confidence throughout this past month.  He went through a long phase of being willing to read to me and never to anyone else.  Twice this week, I found him reading books that he had never read before to Ben.  I think he may become quite the bookworm.

I've been reading Dr. Dolittle to him and we're making good progress.  I want to find a good movie version of the book when we're done.

Changing things up
I am finding myself rather disappointed in our spelling and geography lessons lately.  Sonlight gives a list of words to practice each week, but not much more than that.  Thus, it often gets shoved to the back burner and forgotten.  We switched over to Horizons spelling.  I try to avoid workbooks as much as possible, but in this case, I think we needed it.  Luke has enjoyed it so far and I noticed that he seemed more confident on his spelling test at the end of the week. 

I'm also switching up his Geography curriculum.  We had been using Daily Geography Practice, but the maps are just way too easy.  I've been looking through Classical Conversations material that has map tracing and geography memorization, but it is correlated to the rest of their curriculum which we aren't planning on doing.  I'm going to put some of my own stuff together and keep it casual.  Right now, Luke has been playing games on the National Geographic website that involve assembling the continents, oceans, mountain chains and major rivers.  Here is the link : http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/topics/map-games/?ar_a=1 .  Click on Geo Games.

Ben
Ben's word of the week was "you" and his letter of the week was "P".   He found the word "you" in "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" and was excited to see that he now recognizes quite a few words on each page.  We're continually working on rhyming and waiting for the time when he can connect his sounds to actually read and not just memorize words.

On his own, he pulled out the Wall Street Journal to look for words he knew.  He was really bummed that the word "you" was nowhere to be found.

The boys went to the dentist on Wednesday, so we took a few minutes in the morning to play dentist and learn the names of each kind of tooth. 

Looking cool in his shades

I love these pattern blocks!   The boys have to be so quiet and still when working with them because one false move and everything slips out of place.  Luke and I managed to get a subject or two done in complete silence.  Ahhhh!!!

Seriously, 20 minutes of silence

 Ben is really proud of his alphabet and loves to show it off.

P is for pig!

New Books
We received our Sonlight books for next year.  I found them for such a good price that I couldn't resist.  They came this week and everyone was allowed to look at them for one day before the box was closed up and packed away until July.  I am really looking forward to reading some of them.  Next year, we'll be working on World History which is a subject that I learned very little about in high school (My class had learned early in the year that our teacher could be easily distracted if you asked him about his boat.  Seriously, we asked him every single day).  We'll be reading about the Vikings, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Great Wall of China, and so much more.  After looking at the books, Luke asked to watch a video about the Vikings, so we found a BBC video on YouTube.   He watched it for an hour and was completely entranced. 

My Sweeties