), and set them to work on their chore list and just a couple of informal school assignments--work on Girl Scout badges, and going over some mistakes that Will made on Friday's math. Ah, that darned multi-digit multiplication!TUESDAY: The kids have a playdate scheduled, and social play counts in our school, so this will be a slightly shorter school day, too. Their horse breed for this week is the Knabstrupper--it's Syd's turn to research the breed, and Will's turn to research the geography.
In math, I plan to teach Syd how to play Diffy, a fun little solitaire game that uses subtraction--her Math Mammoth for some of last week and all of this week is subtraction. Will's kind of miserable with the multi-digit multiplication that makes up her current Math Mammoth lessons, so we're doing lots of reinforcement, repetition, and manipulatives. We used Cuisenaire rods and a super-long centimeter ruler last week to practice multi-digit multiplication and division, and on Tuesday I plan to teach Will how to also do it with area models. She hates all of this, by the way--she ONLY wants to do the pencil-and-paper calculations, but I can tell that she doesn't understand what she's doing yet, so I muscle her through the manipulatives until it clicks.
In art last week, I did start Waldorf-style form drawing: concentric circles are our first form. I should be having us repeat this form daily, but I still haven't managed to incorporate daily, repeated activities into our school schedule, so we'll just repeat the form this week and go from there.
This week's read-alouds are both pioneer living history books. The kids each read the first chapter to me, then are responsible for finishing the book on their own that week.
WEDNESDAY: Horseback riding! Free play!
THURSDAY: I'll have the kids continue working on their postcard swap through this month--hopefully someday correspondence can take the place of cursive in their subject list, but until that day, cursive is still being learned slowly but (sort of) steadily.
FRIDAY: The kids will be sorting carnivore and herbivore teeth, as an extension of last week's lesson on what we can learn from what animals leave behind. Depending on how the day goes (last Friday's school somehow managed to take all dang day!), I may get out their fossil bags from our dinosaur dig and have them sort out their edmontosaurus teeth and fragments from the other fossils. Part of our paleontology unit will definitely consist of cleaning, preparing, cataloging, and displaying these fossils, but that project will likely consist of many, many school days all on its own.
Chapter six in A History of US
covers wagon trains, so I'll be having the kids put together these cardstock covered wagons and then, if the glue dries in time, I'll set out and label several small objects (pennies that are bags of flour and salt, unit cubes that are salt pork and bacon, toothpicks that are rifles, building blocks that are stoves, etc.) and have the kids try loading their wagons and seeing what they'll hold.SATURDAY/SUNDAY: The kids are keeping a weather eye on the drive-in's marquee, which they know one of the Freeman kids will be over to update any minute now. We're hoping for Guardians of the Galaxy as the first film--we've already seen it (of COURSE!), but would appreciate the chance to see it again two days in a row!
That wagon project sounds cool. Knowing Emma, she would make all the little what-nots for the wagon out of clay and play with the dang thing for weeks.
ReplyDeleteWe have no school for at least this week, possible next week as well. I actually took this 8 week term off. No way I would be able to focus on school with Jared all banged up and broken.
However, that gives me 8 weeks to try to make Emma's school stuff a little more interesting once we do get started again.
If you can score some balsa wood, it would be SO cool to trace out the pattern pieces onto balsa wood, cut them out with an x-acto knife, and then have her construct the covered wagon. Then it would last for all her weeks of play!
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