Thursday, October 1, 2009

Real post- updates!

I've been semi-neglecting this- and I'm sorry. I should be back to more regular posting!
It has been brought to my attention that quickly jotting lessons and abbreviations in daily reports gets confusing, so I'll make more of a specific effort to talk about what we learned, not just what lesson we did.
Sweet Pea still produces lots of pictures of her favorite imaginary kitty (with a really, really long tail) Meow-Meow. When she's ready to share the written story of Meow-Meow I will post that as well.
First- our big read a loud this week was "How the Whale Got His Throat" by Rudyard Kipling. Sweet Pea and Little Bird laid on blankets and listened to the story. Sweet Pea was particularly impressed that at the end, the whale could no longer devour people.




In math we are still working on number bonds- different ways to break apart groupings. Because we are using Singapore the focus is on breaking it into a group of 10 and then ones left over- for example 16 is one group of ten with six ones. Twenty is two groups of ten with zero ones. We also practiced reading and writing the written words for the numbers 11-20.




We had the story of the mouse and the lion in grammar- and after Sweet Pea copied the moral. She's getting much better at pulling the details out of a story and condensing it. She remembered why the lion didn't eat the mouse, how the mouse saved the lion, and then we talked about ways that little creatures can help big ones in other ways. Looking back at what she wrote I can see that we still need to work on controlling the loops that come off the letter o.



We are still chugging along in our writing program. It is still the same rotation of copywork, narrating back a story, and repeating and repeating... yes, I am still finding this to be a drag.
In history we talked about ancient farming practices in the Fertile Crescent. I think Sweet Pea was most excited to color the picture and imagine crocodiles in the water. I'm biased, but I think she did an excellent job of coloring this in.
I'll leave you with one more illustration- what I presume is a panda. I think.

1 comment:

  1. I wish you could have joined us at the pastor's conference. We are using Math U See and the beginning lessons have 3 houses-huge 100's house, medium 10's house, and small 1's house. They are taught that only 9 of each one can fit in a house. So the biggest number they can make is 999. I'm sure I'm not explaining this well, but it is another way of doing what you are doing in Singapore. A lot of time in the beginning lessons was spent on this so they truly understand place value. Americans make it hard for ourselves by the way that we say the teen numbers. We should say one ty one, but we say eleven. Thankfully we get back on track when we say twenty one!
    I have to remind myself that Sweet Pea is a girl when I read your posts or I would feel like we are SO behind you. It didn't help that September was wasted for me. My oldest is far behind in handwriting and language skills. It doesn't help that he's stubborn!
    When I was teaching, my students loved Kipling. I'll have to start reading that to my boys.

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