Saturday, January 29, 2011

The last full week of January

Wow, this month has really gone by fast. Jenna and I are in the middle of building a snow fort. We hope to continue working on it everyday next week. Jenna had another good week of school. I found a fun way to go over math facts with her. We use her hopscotch mat and she jumps on the number that is the answer. Soon enough I will be timing her to see how fast she can get the answers.

Here is what she did this week

Math - Horizon k book 2 - she did 4 lessons, reviewed math facts and money.

Reading - Explode the code book 3 - she did 2 lessons. She also read aloud.

Spelling - Spelling workout B - We are on lesson 5. She struggled at the beginning of the week with bread and said, but by the end of the week she knew all her spelling words. So we did the Jenna got a 100 spelling dance.

Grammer - First language lessons 1 - She really enjoys this. So far she has memorized 2 poems. Knows the definition of a noun. And she is starting to be able to pick out common and proper nouns.

Writing- Writing with ease 1 - We did four lessons. She would rather not do this, but copy work and narration is important so we do it.

Geography - She is still just working on knowing the seven continents (which she she knows very well now). She nows north,south,east and west. She is also working on knowing the countries in North America. Then we will move on to a different continent. I still want to make a salt map with her. I really need to research about this online.

For some reason we did not do Art this week. I did clean off my big table so we can get creative next week. I am looking forward to making some valantines with her.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

A 4 day school week

This was a short school week, but Jenna still got a weeks work of school work done.

Math - Horizon k book 2 - she did 4 lessons this week and some addition/subtraction math fact reviews. She also worked on some money review.

Reading - Explode the code book 3 - 2 lessons completed. She also did some reading aloud and some reading by herself  without me asking her too. I love seeing her do that.

Spelling - Spelling workout B - She did two word lists for spelling. So that is 20 words. She missed 2 on her spelling test on friday, have and skin. She does know how to spell have now, but for some reason she keeps putting a c in skin.

Grammer - She really loves her grammer lessons. We reviewed nouns - she is learning about person and place nouns. She seems to be understanding for the most part which are common nouns and proper nouns. She also remembered most of her second poem that she needs to memorize. Oh, and she is learning to answer in complete sentences. She needs some input from me at times about answering in complete sentences, but other times she remembers herself.

Writing - Writing with ease level 1 - She is doing very well with her copy work and her narrations.

Geography - She is doing very well when it comes to memorizing the continets and such.

Art - Artistic pursuit preschool - She did a lesson, which was fingerpainting. I really want to incorporate more art into our week.

It was a good week. I hope to have more planned out for next month. Some of my upcoming lessons are on hold because I don't have the books I want, so I will be searching for some new lessons. Maybe incorporating some science into our week. Jenna does like experiments.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Week 2 and the 100th day of school

Jenna finished up her second week of school and she is already ahead of what I had planned for her. She also celebrated the 100th day of school on Friday. After she finished up her school work, we had some fun with 100. We gathered up some items and sorted them into piles of 100. Then we got out the balance scale and had some fun. We first made some prediction of which items would be heavier and then weighed them to see who was right. After we were done, she made a picture using 100 pieces of pasta. We also had some fun balancing on one leg while counting to 100. She counted by 5's and 10's as well.

Here's what we did this week

Math - Horizon k book 2 - She did 4 lessons this week, there was some word problems (which is new to her and she did great). I also had her reviewing her math facts, addition up to 3's and subtraction up to 2's. She reviewed money as well.

Reading - Explode the code book 3 - she completed 2 lessons. She also read everday and fluency is really improving.

Writing - Writing with ease - She is doing really good with her copy work. As of right now, I have her doing this 2 times a week, 2 lessons at a time.

Grammer - FLL1 - I like that she asks to do this. She is already on lesson 15. She knows what a noun is and memorized her first poem last week. She is exited that a new poem will be introduced next week for her to memorize. I am already seeing some improvement on her narration.

Spelling - Spelling workout B - The first day I introduced the words, she got most of them right. She did get two wrong. The first was also, she added two l's and then she got get wrong started with a c, but she realized after she spelled it, it was wrong. She does spelling a few times a week, spelling ball 1 or 2 days and workbook pages 1 day. We test on the last day of week and she got them all right again this week.

Vocabulary - Wordly wise k - We only do one lesson a month. One lesson lasts one or two weeks. She really likes this program.

Art - Artistic pursuit preschool level - She loves this as well. She does on lesson a week, but wants more. So maybe next week I will let her do two. I am also planning some art lessons from some online resources. Our thinking is to have an art show sometime.

Geography - Jenna now knows the seven continents. She has a map that I covered up the names of the continents and she tells me which is which. Then she likes to turn the map over and visually tell me were each continent is on the map. There's a place online that she plays a continent game as well. We also reviewed the difference between map and globe. Talked again about north,south,east, and west. She will learn about the countries in North America, then she will start her world travel to different countries. I am thinking of starting with China because the chinesse New Year is coming up. And at some point we will be drawing the world map, starting with blobs for the continents.

So all in all Jenna had a good week. I am very proud of her and so happy to be able to homeschool her.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

First week back to school

Wow, I am surprised on how well Jenna did adjusting back to school this week. I wasn't sure what to excpect after being off for a whole month. But she did great. So far she is liking all the new curriculium. We ended up starting up everything, but the prehistory. Not what I had originally planned. I thought I would have to ease her into all the new curriculium.

Here's what she did this week

Math - Horizon K book 2 - she did 2 lessons and lots of math fact review. She alos reviewed money, telling time and wholes/halves.

Reading - Explode the code book 3 - she did 2 lessons and lots of reading.

Spelling - Spelling Workout B - We played spelling ball and did some of the spelling exercises in the book. She got two of the ten words wrong the first day we did a pretest(this was before I showed her the words for the week) and then got all of them correct on her spelling test Friday.

Grammer -First language lessons level 1 She did 5 lessons - she learned the definition of a noun - memorized her first poem (I will try to get a video of her reciting her poem). - and some narriation.

Vocabulary - Wordly wise K - She learned 10 new words. We read a story, learned the words meanings, worked in the workbook and read a poem.

Writing - Writing with ease level 1 - We did two weeks of lessons in one week - She did her copy work, which taught her about capitailization at the beginning of the sentence, proper word spacing and punctuation at the end. She also did some narriation.

Geography - We talked about north,south, east,west and the 7 continents. Read Me on the map. Talked abouth the difference between a mpa and a globe.

Art - Artistic pursuit preschool - She did her first lesson. Using crayons, she did a beautiful picture of flowers in a vase and added some bugs. I bought her a sketch pad to use for this.

I am very please with how well she did this week. Prehistory won't be started until I purchase the two books that I want. I am considering trying song school latin eventually, I think that she would love it. We also had some fun in the snow this week, played wii just dance kids and nickeledeon fit. And crafted some snowflakes out of coffee filters.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Happy 2011

A new year and a fresh start of the second half of the school year. Jenna will be starting on Monday. I spent some of the week organizing the new curiculium and packing away some of the old. I was surprised at the big stack of papers that she has from the first half of the school year. I love seeing how much she has improved in her writing since the beginning of the year.