Language Arts: We did the ninth week of Writing with Ease. Sweet Pea is doing well with copy work and narration. The story of the week was E.B. White's classic Charlotte's Web.
This worked really well because both of my children absolutely adore Charlotte's Web. I'm using the student pages included with Writing With Ease- I've seen a lot of complaints that the lines are huge for this age, and I agree that they are larger then those we use for handwriting. It doesn't seem to bother Sweet Pea, though, and she loves the little graphics on the pages. So I just write the sentence in cursive for her to copy. It's been good for my handwriting, as well, having to make such a careful example.
We completed Chapter 9 of Spelling Power. I don't know how I'm feeling about this program. I keep having these thoughts about language arts. I'm not sure why. Sweet Pea can do it, and it's at her level. But I don't know if it's really teaching her spelling, or if she retaining it, or if I even need to expect that at this level. Who knows! Not this mama.
First Language Lessons is going well. Grammar seems pretty basic and simple at this point, and Sweet Pea is starting to be able to accurately pick nouns out of both verbal and written sentences, and can usually differentiate between common and proper nouns. There is a LOT of review built into this, which is good in that I don't have to think of any examples and bad because I'm one of those people who doesn't like to skip things. Chug along!
We didn't do a lot of bookwork for phonics this week, instead Sweet Pea and I just read together. It was nice to see where she was outside of the workbook, and I think will make the next round of digraphs more appealing.
Handwriting is going well now that we've resumed Cursive First. I really do love this program- it's so easy and so perfect to tailor. No doubts about this subject!
Math: Singapore Earlybird 2b is going just as well as 2a and it's predecessors. We also brought back out the tangrams and both Sweet Pea and Little Bird had a great time forming pictures with the shapes.
Tomorrow will be the big science and history day. Monday we spent the day with a delightful gaggle of children (and their mothers). Storytime was unfortunately canceled this week, so we did our own stories at home.
Next week is week 10- the first week of the new quarter! It will be pretty similar to this quarter, except I'm planning on introducing Prima Latina. Yay!
My 3 year old LOVES Prima Latina! He repeats EVERYTHING on the CD ("Lesson one, ....") We can quiz him and he knows all his vocabulary words we have done so far. He was amazed to recognize luna in luna moth in a science magazine we were reading. We have just had "fun" listening to the CD-we haven't done bookwork yet.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in Prima Latina as well, so I look forward to hearing your experiences. FWIW I find myself often questioning bits and pieces of our language arts as well ~ more so than any other components.
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