Another week done and first letter to her pen pal

We had a good week.

Math - Horizon k - started counting by 5's this week and started addition facts she has the one's mastered and is working on the 2's. And the rest was review of money(dimes and pennies), time and ect.

Spelling- She had another good week with some new words and words from previous weeks which she is still spelling correctly.

Writing- Handwriting without tears - almost done with the K book, which has her working on words and sentences for copy work. Will be starting the 1st grade book real soon. We also wrote to her pen pal this week. I am so proud of her, she is writing on lines now.

Reading- We are finishing up ending consonant blends and will be moving on to beginning consonant blends. We only did Explode the code once this week. She read very well this week. And she picked up a book here and there this week to read on her own. I love that she is starting to enjoy reading without me asking her to read.

Art - We are working on some basic skills, before we really get into our new art curriculum. She made some hearts this week for mom and grandma.

Social Studies - We are gearing up for community which will start on Monday.

Science -She started building and decorating her rockets with daddy. Looking forward to blasting them off.

The rest of the week was spent playing and just being a kid.

End of week 4

I can't believe how much Jenna has learned in the past four weeks and how well she has adjusted to a structured school year. Unlike last year which was very relaxed and mostly all play. As of right now, we make sure to get the basics done each day and add in everything else when we can. I would rather her be outside playing with friends.

Here is what we have been working on this week.

Math - Horizons K - We are now counting to 100 with no problem at all, reviewing adding using the number line, introduced the ruler and measuring, reviewed place value and reviewing dimes and nickles.

Reading - started OPGTR - we are on the consonants blends (which she is doing very well with). She is reading the free progressive phonic books and we started ETC book 2 (we never did the first book) and she liked it.

Handwriting - HWOT K - She is almost done with this and I am going to use the double line paper I have to make her some copy work. I have seen improvement in the past 4 weeks, but I need to remind her to follow through and do her best in all her writing(not just the HWOT). I have started teaching her about sentences and when to capitalize.

Spelling - We are pretesting on Monday's and using the words she spells wrong for her spelling that week. I am also looking at her everday writing for misspell words and we will use them. This week her words were, her last name, got, put, sand, hand and stop. She tested today and got them all right. I will review these with her next week to see if she is still spelling them right.

Science - She has some rockets waiting to be built and then we will try them out. I plan on adding more science after summer.

Social Studies - We are getting ready to do community at the beginning of the month. Visiting the businesses right her in town and creating a map of our town.

Art- Will be starting real soon. Artistic pursuit preschool and we will be using some free online art for K.

We will be adding our Wordly Wise K vocabulary real soon to our schooling. We are both excited about this.

I have some other things that will be in the works for her schooling, like adding music and one day a week having a nursery rhyme or poetry tea. She really liked the tea idea.

So this was another good week and hopefully many more to come.

Mid week

Wow, it's Wednesday already. This week is flying by.

I decided to change how we do our spelling. I will be pretesting on Monday's and what ever words she gets wrong will be her spelling words. I am finding out that she already knows how to spell alot of words. I am also going to take words that she spells wrong in daily writing and use them as spelling words. As far as writing goes she is improving daily. I picked up some double line paper, so that I can have her start doing some copy work. She will be writing to her first penpal pretty soon and I would like her to write on the lined paper. Math is still going really good. And reading is awesome. She is working on consonant blends and is doing very well. We went for a walk today to set up times to visit the different businesses in our community. We will start doing this the first of the month.

So far so good this week. It's been beautiful outside so we have been outside playing with friends. Once summer is done we will buckle down more.

Oh and we have some rockets that we will be using for science class. We just need to build them first.

Almost the end of the week

For some reason I thought it was Friday today, even after doing the calendar. So because of me thinking it was Friday, Jenna had her spelling test and reviewed the words from previous weeks. She spelled them all right. This is kind of silly, but after she spells all her words right, we do the Jenna got all her words right spelling dance. Nothing like Jenna and mom shaking their booty, lol. Handwriting is coming along great, I am seeing improvements. This week she blew me away with her reading, it is amazing. We are getting reading to work on consonant blends. The one night she read a whole book by herself to her stuffed doggie. I really love our Horizon math, it is a keeper. She just started to learn about place value today and reviewed adding with the number line. We started reading and discussing about being respectful. Character building to me is very important and I feel that the younger the better. We have worked on responsiblity in the previous weeks and she is implementing it daily. It's still summer, so when it comes to science or social studies, it is hit or miss if we are going to do it each week. I would rather her be outside playing with friends and just having fun. Rain or shine we try to get outside. She loves putting on her bathing suit and playing in the rain. Which we did earlier this week. She also has been busy playing a new game that she won at the reading program. And enjoying her box of 96 crayons that she got today. I am thankful to be homeschooling my daughter. I love being a part of my daughters growth academically and in her everyday life.

My little artist and writer in training

A typical day for Jenna is filled with lots of writing notes, stories and drawings. So it got me thinking how can I nurture what she excels at. Thanks to this blog, satorismiles.com, I found some really great curriculum that I think would be great to use with Jenna.

When it comes to art, I am going to use Artistic Pursuit, The Way They See It. And if we like it, they have other grade levels which we will use. I am also going to pick up Drawing with Children.
As far as writing goes, I am going to try wordly wise for vocabulary(since she is always asking what certain words mean) and she seems to think that this colorful curriculum will be fun. Write source k is on our agenda as well(which should nurture her creative writing). I don't want to schedule to much in her daily schedule, because she is only 4. So, these will be 100 percent child lead of when I am teaching them. I am hoping to make these new additions fun and enjoyable for my little girl.

End of our second week

So far so good. Jenna and I are loving homeschooling. We went off schedule some days to play with friends, but we still got what we needed to get done on those days. I like the flexiablity that I have with homeschooling , to be able to let jenna go out and play during school.

Earlier in the week we did our first Science experiment. catch a rainbow, http://www.kidzone.ws/science/rainbow.htm. Jenna was so cute she put her science goggles (aka rob's work goggles) on when we did this experiment. Then she wrote in her science journal the supplies that were used and a picture of what she saw. We also made some colors using primary colors. She again wrote in her science journal, which two colors made a new color.

We worked on our Horizon math, she is learning how to add using the number line. Writing her numbers, like 20 and up. And reviewing her pennies and dimes.

Jenna had her second spelling test today, she got them all right. Her words were, in, is, it, big, did and love. I also retested her on last weeks words, she got them all right, too. There are other words she has learned to spell just from asking when she is writing for fun, and she now can spell on her own. Some of the words are eat(grandpa taught her that), we, you, will, everyone in the families names, can, I, to, do and many more words. I am going to make her up a file folder word wall for some big words that she uses alot.

Our handwriting program is going good. She is finally seeing for herself that when she forms her letters from the top, they look alot neater. Now to get her to apply that to her everyday fun writing. Speaking of writing, I set her up a writing center and wil be adding more goodies to her her writing table. So far she has some fuzzie pencils, colored pencils, glitter pens, regular pens and markers. A bunch of different size envelopes, some flowere shaped cards, tags, a bunch of paper, some notebooks, stickers, little sticky notes, some clipboards, some writing printouts and some colored clips. I need to make her up some blank books this weekend.

Reading is going good. We are still working on her short vowel words and sight words. I ordered this http://www.walmart.com/ip/3132086 and some black ink(so I can print off the rest of the phonic books). I am looking into an incentive to get her reading more. I know she is looking forward to being able to read the Arthur books herself.

As I am posting this, Jenna is writing up a storm at her writing table. I am so glad she love's it.

The second week of school

Last night I asked Jenna if she likes homeschooling, and she said I like everything except for when we have to practice writing. She said, I love to write (which she does alot of outside of schooling), I just don't like when you make me practice writing in my school book. So I explained to her why we are practicing and that it's something that needs to be done daily in school. With a little moan, she said okay. So after some blog reading, I seen some writing centers set up in homeschooling rooms. Now I am inspired to set up a table for Jenna to get creative at with her writing. I told her about it and she is very excited. So I am thinking sometime this week, I will clear off my crafting table and set her up with her own writing center. I will gradually pick things up for her writing center at the dollar stores and such.

Today was a fun day at school. We read The little red hen and made stick puppets of the animals in the story, so that we could act out the story. Math went very well as usual and she is enjoying it. She was given new spelling words today and spelled them all correctly with her magnet letters. I am adding a bonus word, which will be love. She has spelled it luv in the past(which is what it sounds like), so I decided to make that her spelling bonus word. She also read alot from her phonic readers that I printed out this weekend and we went over some sight words. We talked about the season of summer and what words make us think of summer. And read a poem about the sun and colored it. Another great day here at Jenna Academy.