Weekly Review: First of the Year 2012-2013

 

Well this our first update for the year.  Honestly, I struggled with how best to convey this update.  While I love the the weekly review,  they take a lot of time to prepare.  Time that I can spend doing something else.  So this year I will no longer have a weekly review.  Don’t panic!  There will still be updates but not in the same format as last year.  In addition I was beginning to feel that my blog was too homeschool focused.  I love my kids and I am pro homeschool but there are so many other things I would like to blog about. 

We are three weeks into our school year and I have so many great pictures and not enough time to share about everything we are learning.  So lets jump right in. The first two pictures are M&M math and a page from our word book.  The M&M’s are a great teaching tool for sorting by color, number, making shapes adding subtracting you name it.  After we finish with M&M math the boys get to eat the candy.  The best part! Emmanuel has a goal of counting to 100 so we are diligently working hard to get there a.s.a.p..  He currently can count to 50 but in his mind that is not good enough.  He stares at his 100’s chart and says daily “Mom I want to count to 100.”  The kid is determined and persistent.  I do my best to reassure him that he will get there soon enough.  Recently he as also become very obsessed with turning five.  We encourage him to enjoy being four but he has his own ideas.  Next is the page from our word book.  The word book is a new addition to our school day.  Anytime we come across a word we don’t know we look it up in our dictionary and write down the definition in our word book. 

The next two pictures are a tot school activity and math facts practice.  Joshua is not technically apart of our school day yet, but I include him as best I can.  That means there must be more than one activity that I can grab quickly that will hold his attention.  In this particular picture I would call out a letter and he would find it and place it on the magnetic board.  Next is math facts practice.  By the end of this year I would like Christopher to know his math facts without thinking about them or counting in his head or hands.  So we have implemented several fun activities.   Monday’s are now Math Game Monday.  Everyone gets to play math games on Monday. Card games, board games, computer games whatever Monday is the day that we set aside time to learn and practice math concepts while playing.  Here you can see I set up a deck of cards and previously I took note of the math facts that were a challenge to him.  I would draw two cards and he would answer.  Once he masters all the facts we will begin drawing three or more cards. 

The last two pictures are Christopher painting his paper mache globe and Emmanuel reading a book to Joshua.   The paper mache globe is a activity for our science curriculum.  The first 18 weeks of science is focused on the earth.  So far we have learned about the earth’s atmosphere, the different layers of the earth, how the earth spins around the sun creating day and night.  Christopher is really enjoying this years science.  Lastly we have Emmanuel reading one of his books to Joshua.  We  work almost daily on his reading and he is growing by leaps and bounds. 

Well, that’s our first update for the 2012-2013 school stay tuned for more.