Weekly Wrap-up Post ::: The Second Week, August 20-24

Another Friday and our second week of school has been wrapped up. Yay! Another week of mostly at-home days which I thoroughly enjoyed.

B had a good week this week! Last week she and I struggled a bit to find our groove in school. Between her personality and the 8-10 month difference between when she is starting kindergarten and her sisters started kindergarten (i.e., N1 was almost 6 when she started; B turned 5 a few month ago), her needs for kindergarten are a bit different that where I was aiming to start her at. But that’s totally ok. We spent the week exploring some more with our math manipulatives (doing Saxon K lessons 6-9), filling in a few handwriting work sheets, and reading a LOT of picture books along with our Teach Your Child to Read lessons (lessons 5-8 this week).

Our favorite part was pulling out one of my all time favorite books to read with my kindergarteners, Blueberries for Sal, and do some fun Five-in-a-Row-ish type activities with it. We used some freebies from Homeschool Share, and on Thursday afternoon we baked a blueberry cake to share with the family. It got two thumbs up from all of us.

N2 also had a big week – due in large part to the new smile she’s sporting below. : ) We lost a third tooth on Sunday afternoon and the fourth on Tuesday afternoon. She’s finding hard to say her S’s but is otherwise absolutely adorable with her gap-toothed grin.

N2 had a normal week of lessons in all subjects. We spent one math lesson learning about estimating volume and spent a wet 45 minutes filling up different containers and trying to guess how many cups they would hold.

 

N1 had a fabulous school week as well. She and I have really be plugging along on building her confidence for her timed math tests that she works on each day. Over the last two weeks, she has done a few extra per day, and we are starting to see some results. So proud of how she is applying herself!

She also wowed us in the kitchen this week. She found a recipe in one of my cookbooks and asked to make it one morning for breakfast. I, miraculously, had all the ingredients and she set about making Grandma’s French Toast for us. We don’t know who Grandma is or was, but her French toast was delicious!

  

As a group, the girls and I have a worked on a few subject together each day:

• we are reading through the book of Matthew together and drawing pictures to go along with what we are hearing about for our Bible time.
• we continued on our animal lapbook learning about distinguishing features of reptiles, birds and amphibians, as well as some facts about mollusks and echinoderms. (Quite a bit of this I learned along with them. I love that!) We scored some neat animal videos today at the library – Eyewitness DVD: Reptile Eyewitness: Amphibian , and Eyewitness: Insect – and we’ll watch a few of those about some of these animal groups as well over the next week.
• We also read chapter one in Story of the World and briefly familiarized ourselves with the Tigris and Euphrates River were. This is material we will touch on in one of the first few weeks of Classical Conversations so we’ll hit it again in memory work soon!

As for the boy, we are still transitioning him to a little room time on his own each day while we work on school each morning. (As I mentioned in last week’s wrap-up, he has about 20 minutes on his own, and then sisters take turn going in and playing with him while I have one-on-one time with them for some subjects. Truly he’s been doing GREAT with this!) During his alone time one morning this week, he apparently decided to take a snooze. When N1 went to check on him she found him crashed out on the floor under his nigh-night … and there we left him for a good hour and a half. : ) No afternoon naptime that day, but our morning was quite productive!

Today, being Friday, we got out for a little outside / nature time and a trip to the library! Our first stop was a nature trail not far from our house. I told the girls I have visions of us walking this trail at least once a month over the next year so we can watch it change with the seasons. Truth-be-told, they were not as excited about my vision as I was. : ) It was quite warm and the walk was almost a mile. I think we’ll enjoy the walk part of it more the next time I am aiming for us to go in late September.

That said, a few pictures from our outing so we’ll have them to compare later on this year…

The boy found some big rocks and was having a blast climbing around on them. While I still bring the stroller with us most places so I have a way of containing him, this time we left it in the car and he had so much fun walking and exploring.

 

The munchkins did a quick pose at the beginning before we got all hot and sweaty and were in no mood for smiling!

Hope you all had a great week … I haven’t really intended to be such an intermittent blogger for the three people that read here … but I’m have a hard time find any extra minutes now-a-days. I’m working on improving that and hope to share some Read-Aloud Thursday books and Project Life pages soon.

Have a great weekend!

Linking up with Kris at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers for the Weekly Wrap-Up.