Weekly Wrap-up: Busy Busy

Our box with 3 new Kumon books came Monday afternoon, and Monkey had a great time looking them over, and then doing a few pages. He would have done a lot more, had I let him! I thought we'd keep the shiny new-ness of the books a little longer and make him pace himself a bit. So we stopped well before he wanted to. At this point, we've tried both the tracing and the pasting book. I think they're great. If I had to guess, I'd say that the pasting book is probably Monkey's favorite, but he regularly asks to "do my school books."



Math also went well this week. We worked on "partners" in numbers; mostly 4 because Monkey likes 4 best. I tried finding all the partners in 4 with candies - one butterscotch & 3 peppermints. I think that would have worked better if I'd used some M&Ms! But when we did it with stickers it went better. Though I see that my picture cuts off one of the stickers on his paper...



Nature study wasn't awesome this week, but we did get some done. I've been having too many contractions some days, and my doctor says to "take it easy," which makes nature study a particular challenge. We may be light on that all summer, though I hope that we can keep getting something in each week. This week, we found a mushroom in our grass after all the rain we've had stopped, and so we picked it and had a look.



Phonics also went well. I think this was the first we've done since getting back from Grandma's funeral, and I was pleasantly surprised by how little he seemed to have lost in our month-long break from reading. I'd been worried that, with the skill so incomplete still, an interruption like that would cause some forgetting. But it looks like the only think that he's lost is the budding excitement that he'd been getting as he realized that he was reading, and I'm sure that will come back... as soon as I can convince him to try a book again. But he's doing great with our reading games, so for now I'm content to wait & just do some drilling on words with the penny game. He still loves the penny game.

For our read-aloud this week, we did some poetry, because I'm having a terrible time deciding what I want to read to him. We were doing Black Beauty at the beginning of the summer, but I just don't want to read that one right now, so I'm looking for a new one. In the mean time we did some silly poems, which may be what we do again next week. We're going to put "Little Miss Muffet" in his poetry book, because it makes him laugh.

We're getting very close to the end of the Book of Mormon, and I want to do the four Gospels with him next, so if anyone knows of a reading chart for just the gospels, especially one that's fun for kids, that would be appreciated. The ones I've seen in the past have been for the whole New Testament, and I'm not convinced that he'd get much out of reading the epistles just yet, at three-almost-four!

We did some just-for-summer-fun stuff too: a trip to the park & a pair of playdates. We were supposed to go to the you-pick strawberry place, but that got canceled in the name of "taking things easy." Hopefully next week I'll be doing a bit better & we can try again. Monkey's also got his eye on the wading pool that we promised to get out of the top of the garage, so we'll probably have some friends over in the next week sometime to do some splashing around.