This week's art project is part of our US geography unit study. Both kids got to color the American flag plus A7 made a patriotic bookmark!
This is X5's flag!
This week we are rowing the book, How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the USA. This is not a FIAR book, but it has all the elements of one! I've been wanting to do a US geography unit study and this book is perfect for it!
Geography: states of the US
History: symbols of USA, how do you celebrate the 4th?
Language arts: copy work, word find, vocab words
Science: US natural resources, manufacturing, measuring tools
Home Ec: how to set the dinner table?
Art: fireworks! map of US
This unit study plus math is all we are doing this week, I really want to spend a proper amount of time on this.
We've been reading the Pledge of alliance book everyday, hopefully this week he'll have it memorized!
This past Monday morning, as the kids and I were doing our read alouds, we heard the doorbell ring. To our surprise it was my Mom and my sister Jeannie!
They came over to see the kids and to give X5 his birthday gift, since they were not able to make it for his actual birthday.
Needless to say the kids and I were pleasantly surprise and very happy to have Grandma visit us during the middle of school. We canceled school(we finished everything after they left) and spent some quality time with Grandma and Titi of course!
We all went out for a delicious lunch and after we got back it was time for them to leave. We took pictures with Titi but forgot Grandma, sorry Mom!!!
After we got done with school we went for a Fall scavenger hunt. We had to find pine cones, feathers, acorns, spider web, empty nest, maple and oak leaves and so on...
We found a few of the things on the list, but we're going to a different park tomorrow to find the rest.
Pine cones!
Feathers!
Wild berries
Maple leaves
Mushroom
Spider web
I can tell that A7 really understood what was being asked, the book always shows examples, of course, but she really went for her own thing here!!
X5 did really well with his art project considering he doesn't enjoy coloring that much. I helped him out in the beginning just to show him what he needed to do, he did all the rest!
This week we are doing an Autumn unit study. We'll be reading an assortment of books that deal with Fall and fall activities, we'll have a leaf hunt and a fall scavenger hunt...
Every year the kids get their pictures taken for their birthday. X5's birthday was four weeks ago, we finally got his 5 yr. old pictures taken this morning. We were able to go online and look at thumbnails of all the poses.
Now, this is not copyright infringement or anything, we already paid for the pictures!! We'll get them in about two weeks. But here is a little sample of them, because he looks too darn cute to make you wait two weeks to see them!
He is going to be taking this to COOP for show and tell, since this week we are to show something related to music or art!
"Christianity isn’t a crutch for the weak; it’s a stretcher for the dead. The gospel doesn’t claim to help the weak; it claims to make the dead live again. We reject the notion of the crutch of Christianity because we don’t need something to help us walk along; we need something to make us truly alive." by Michael Kelley
This week we are rowing the book Night of the Moonjellies.
"This beautifully illustrated picture book debut evokes the fullness of a New England childhood through descriptions of a single summer day"
Geography: New England
Soc. Stu: Responsability
Lang. Arts: Vocabulary words
Science: biome, moonjelly fish
I love Fall, it is my favorite time of year. All of the best holidays happen in Fall... Halloween(lost of candy) Thanksgiving(lots of food) and Christmas(4 days after Fall ends so I include it in there!).
I love Fall decorations, especially in the kitchen/dinning area. It makes everything so warm and cozy!
Thanks to Nina (for pointing out centerpieces ideas) I finally have some Fall decorations for my dinner table. Yesterday I had a tea party for the ladies of the Church and I decorated the table with a Fall theme!
I know for some this looks way simple but for me this is a BIG DEAL!! ha ha! I'm going to look for some plate settings that'll look good with the table cover. My DH told me I should dress the table up for dinner everyday like this! I'm trying to convince him to let me get a Fall plate set, a small of course, 4 plates, 4 mugs maybe salad plates shaped like leaves!!!
I'm still trying to figure out what type of learner X5 is. I know he learns by hearing, because there's been many times I've read a book to A7 while X5 was in the room playing with somethings else and he knew the details of the story I was reading.
I know he learns by watching what others do and I know he learns by doing hence the reason he is so good at computer games. How do I use that to teach him how to read though?
He is not very good with the alphabet, he knows about 3/4 of the alphabet. I'm told he does not need to know the name of the letters to learn the sounds the letters make. The thing is he is not very interested in any of it... so I visited other homeschool blogs with 4-5 yr old boys learning how to read. One Mom posted about this Leap Frog DVD Letter Factory.
She said it really helped her 5 yr old son get interested in letters and their sound! I went ahead and bought it from Amazon.com. It is about 30 minutes long which is perfect. The kids watched it today and X5 loved it!, he kept pointing to the letters on my keyboard and telling what their sound was... yeah!!!!!
This Friday we start COOP aka Lamppost. We are doing 8 weeks with a week off after the first 4 weeks. The week off we'll be going to the Pumping Patch!
This semester I'm teaching the K to 2nd graders. We are doing art. Yes I know, me?? teaching art??
I'm doing Scribble Art with the kids.
It seems really simple and fun, plus one of the coop moms who happened to be a special ed teacher in another life told me scribble art was great for developing some stuff in kids that would be very beneficial for some other stuff, which makes it a really good art thing to do... ha ha!
I don't remember all the words that she used but she was clearly impressed with it and wants her daughter in the class, so it has be good!!
Here are some sample pages...
Last night was the Club carnival at our Church. We had games, prizes, snow cones, soft pretzels, pop corn... you get the idea.
The purpose of the carnival is to kickoff Reach Kids Club! Parents can register their kids for the club year. We meet every Wednesday at 7PM to 8:30.
We have bible stories, games, activities and usually a snack. Kids get to sing during the club opening. Dh and I are the club coordinators, which means we are in charge of the schedule, yearly activities and our year end camp out.
It is a lot of fun in the beginning, of course once we get to May we are ready for a long break! But this is September and we are eager to start! We have a lot of adults helping this year. We are short two people, hopefully we'll get them before next week, if not, we'll do with what we have!
It has been nothing short of a miracle to see this come together this summer. At the end of Clubs last May we had some of the leaders and helpers tell us they were not coming back in the Fall. We truly needed to rely on God, knowing that if He wanted to keep this going, He would be faithful to provide the help we needed, and with two weeks to go before kickoff He did!!
A7 enjoying her snow cone!
X5 playing pop the balloons!
X5's art project was to use different shapes to form a person!
A few posts ago I made a comment on how X5 is doing great with the workbox system but A7 isn't. I decided to go right to the source and ask her why she didn't like them and if there was any way I could make it better for her.
She likes how X5 has his boxes but not how she has them, you may remember his look like this,
and hers looked like this...
No more! I don't have the room for another rack like X5 has, but I do have room for something like this...
This is the Iris 6-Drawer Mobile Chest, found it at Office Max and it is a perfect workbox! I like the clear one better. This is what her station looks like now...
You can't take the drawers out but we came up with "move the label" system. At the beginning of school the numbers are in the middle of the drawer, once she is done with that box she moves the label to the right of the drawer as you can see in the above pic.
There are only 6 drawers but that's okay. Anything extra I can just add to her schedule strip, things like free reading, read aloud, games etc. Those kinds of things don't need to be inside a box.
She loved it! She knew exactly what to do this morning, hardly needed my help. Needles to say, today we had a great school day. Yes, they do exist!
This week we are rowing the book Gramma's Walk.
Donnie's Gramma gets around in a wheelchair, but through the magic of imagination, the two of them walk to the beach; listen, feel, and smell the sea; identify prints in the sand; and admire the wildlife.
Social Studies: handicapped, imagination
Language arts: compound words, backtracking
Science: the senses, the beach
I was told about Starfall.com, a website perfect for what his needs are right now. So we'll do that for a while and come back to RME when he is truly ready.
Entrance of the Millennium Theater.
We were not allowed to take any pics during the performance, but I took these while inside the theater. It was beautiful and it smelled, I kid you not, like cinnamon cookies!
Now that I have a plan for art this year and a curriculum to follow, other than the FIAR art lessons of course. I'm going to start posting our art projects every Wednesday!
This will be a great way for me to document what we do for art every week.
There are 7 units in this book, we are probably going to cover four of them this year.
This week we are on unit 1: Learning about lines
Assorted color construction paper strips.
Horizontal lines
Vertical lines
Diagonal lines
