Wrapping Up Week 12 (2015-16)

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Deanna

We are one third of the way through our school year! This week wrapped up our first 12-week term, and we celebrated by starting our fall break a little early and heading to a local indoor playground on Friday to stay out of the triple digit heat that’s stealing autumn’s glory. We still have the boys’ writing class next Tuesday, but other than that we’ll be taking next week off from our usual school subjects.

This week in our Preschool

This week we were able to do more of what I had planned on for this year as far as preschool time with Arianna. I got out our autumn books and we spent time enjoying activities related on The Little Scarecrow Boy by Margaret Wise Brown (see my last post for more details).

(In the story, the little scarecrow boy practices making scary faces. Hence the tongue.)

Science

We finished reading the last few lessons in Our Weather & Water, then spent some time discussing coral reefs and examining some pieces of coral with a magnifying glass.

Then we watched The Magic School Bus Goes to Mussel Beach to wrap up this unit. It feels so good to have completed something! The book is now back on the shelf waiting to be pulled out again next time around if I decide to stick with a four year science cycle. (That’s my plan at least for the elementary years, and we’ll be in those for at least another decade or so.)

Read Alouds

We continued reading King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green to supplement our history of the Middle Ages, and finished Mary Poppins, by P.L. Travers for our fun reading this week.

Independent Learning

I’m really thankful that we gave Teaching Textbooks Math 3 a try this year. Both boys are thriving on it, and it’s freed me up to spend more time with the little ones while they work through their lessons, though I’m usually watching on the big TV screen out of the corner of my eye. I like it so much I went ahead and purchased Math 4 for when they finish up these lessons.

The one frustration I’ve had with the program, however, is that it doesn’t emphasize the importance of adding the ones column first when doing multiple digit addition (or subtraction). At first it didn’t matter that Ian was starting with the numbers on the left because he didn’t have to carry (or borrow), but once he started getting into bigger numbers it obviously became an issue. I’ve been trying to encourage him to write down the problems but he has been really resistant. This week, however, I stumbled upon an idea that he really liked, and now he doesn’t complain at all about it. I folded the paper up into sixteenths, intending just to help him make good use of the whole sheet, but he preferred leaving it folded up like a little book, and he got such a kick out of it that suddenly his stubbornness melted away and he enthusiastically jotted down each problem in his little “notebook.” Whatever makes things fun, right?