Weekly Wrap-up: The Appley One

I love autumn! The colors, the smells, the trips to the orchard, the FOOD. Autumn is good eatin'! We went to the apple orchard near here, and they've got apples, which are yummy. We also got several pie pumpkins, which I am in process of cooking down, pureeing, and putting in the freezer. Not only is it cheaper than grocery store pumpkin, it's easy, and I keep hearing about how there's shortages... don't want to be without the pumpkin! Pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, pumpkin scones: YUM. Plus, the orchard makes for good pictures.



I think my favorite part of school this week was that we added Narration to the mix. I ran across such good ideas on the Charlotte Mason Carnival that I decided to go ahead and try it.

One thing I loved about the ideas on Practical Pages was that in every case it made the story touchable. I decided to go with something familiar: our flannel board. I made color copies of a couple of the illustrations, covered them with contact paper & sewed felt on the back. I'm not sure that I'll do this again, cuz that was a lot of work for what we got out of it! But, if it was a favorite book, and I though that he'd tell the story a couple of times & enjoy playing with them, then I'd absolutely do it again, cuz it's not that much work.

Clearly, this is going to take some practice. The actual narrating part was surprisingly tricky. Monkey wasn't sure what I wanted... I wasn't sure what I wanted. I'm not sure that I'm any better at summarizing a story than he is! But we did it. And we'll do another story next week. And practice makes everything better.

Math went well. Math is probably Monkey's favorite, right now. We did more flannel board stuff.

Same stuff, different day: mostly. Math Expressions had us do trapezoids & octagons (OK, they were supposed to hexagons, but I made 'em before I realized that. I oughta read the instructions better, I think!). Last time we did the "mat" activities they had a different focus.


The book also suggested singing math songs, so we did a couple of those this week too. "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" and the like.


We also did patterns on the flannel board because it's fun. Monkey brought me his dot-to-dot book one evening and asked could we please do some? Why, YES!

We did a little Nature Study on a trip to the park for a playdate (though I also count the orchard for nature study).


Phonics is going really well: I decided to focus on just drilling with the games, rather than trying to do much reading in the Bob Books yet, because it was so frustrating to Monkey, and I want him to enjoy reading. So we got the Reading House (practicing rhyming cvc words, from Happy Phonics) back out, and he loves it now. Used to hate it. But it seems to make more sense to him this time. And I'm working on making cards of the words that are in those Bob Books to practice in our games. We'll probably start using them this next week. But it's so nice to have him asking for more of his phonics games again!

We finished Charlotte's Web, so we're just starting a new Read-Aloud. We read the first few pages of Stuart Little, but a friend loaned us Mr. Poppin's Penguins, so I think we'll switch and read that next instead.