Weekly Wrap-up: Back in Our Groove

Well, it took a few days, after last week's (happy) chaos, but we're hitting our groove again. Everybody's had a cold, so we skipped the Nature Study outside in the cold this week, but otherwise things went really well!

In Phonics this week, we kept working on drilling cvc words. He's getting there. He can do it, it's just soooo S-L-O-W when you have to read every little letter! But, today he surprised me twice by knowing what stuff said, outside our lesson. I'm sure it's just a matter of practice & gaining confidence and experience.

Two weeks ago, Math Expressions called for hexagons and trapezoids. I wasn't paying much attention, and I made octagons for the flannel board, rather than hexagons... and then couldn't keep them straight when I was talking to him. This week when I asked during Math if he wanted to do a Math Monster or a shapes picture, he asked for hexagons. OK! So I made some hexagons and we did flannel board math that day. (We did the monster another day.)



We're well into our Mr. Popper's Penguins Read Aloud now, and Monkey likes it well enough to protest when our chapter is finished, and to ask for seconds at bedtime when we read it at naptime. I'm enjoying it too: this one is pretty funny!

Raven tried something new this week too: we got out the high chair and let him try sitting in there, well padded by blankets, since he's not at all stable yet. It seems to agree with him, and Monkey lost no time at all in showing him the fine art of cooking. Cooking cars into stew. Yum.



I learned some new tricks too. I took all those wedding pictures last week, and this week I discovered batch processing - that is, I set it up, and Photoshop does a whole batch of pictures the same way, without my needing to do more than wind it up and set it loose. Considering that on the day of the wedding I took around 400 pictures, I'm very happy about this discovery! It means that I spend my time doing the fun, artistic stuff, and not the whole rotate the picture so they're not sideways thing. Here's my favorite from this week:

Weekly Wrap-up: The Very Busy One

My goodness, it's been a busy busy week!

Raven's gotten pretty good at smiling, which is delightful. A new friend was moving, and her car was dying, so Andy spent quite a bit of time helping her with both problems, and then I got my turn helping clean the old place. I've also been playing around with my new Etsy shop (check out the link in my sidebar). We've been to the orchard, then had friends over to play in the kitchen. Oh, and Andy worked about 10 hours of overtime this week. Plus, we did pretty well on school.

Math has been Monkey's favorite, lately. Early in the week he brought me our dot-to-dot book, and we did several pages. Later in the week, we did a shapes activity. The idea was to take 2 shapes & make a picture out of them. I thought he'd love this one, but it was actually not terribly interesting, which surprised me. We also did another Math Monster.



Phonics, he hasn't been so interested in, so there hasn't been any extras here! But he did spend some time reviewing his letters & sounds on starfall, and we played his new Monster Much game, using double consanat words that he feeds to the monster after he reads them. That was a well received!



We're nearly finished with Charlotte's Web, our current Read Aloud. Just this afternoon a friend recommended Mr. Popper's Penguins, so we will likely do that next.

Scripture Reading is going well. Monkey and I are making slow but steady progress in the four Gospels, and I'm starting to remember to read the Book of Mormon to Raven more regularly. It helps that he has more awake time now than he did at first!

Weekly Wrap-up: Finding Normal Edition

So, we've got this new baby, and we think he's pretty special; he's hands-down a keeper. However, new babies do have a way of destroying any semblance of messing with a routine. We started rebuilding our routine this week.

Phonics: Monkey's getting there. I think I'm going to pick up the Ordinary Parents' Guide to Teaching Reading, not to use for him, but for me to make sure that I'm getting all the rules in a somewhat coherent order. I love Happy Phonics, and that will continue to be our primary focus, but I do want to have some reference material for what are the rules. I didn't learn with phonics; I'm pretty sure that I was taught with a more whole-language approach, and I want a little hand-holding to be sure that I'm not missing something important. After all, I've never taught reading before! Unfortunately, It's looking like I'll have to pay full price. On the other hand, if I do it through Amazon, I can get Mudpies to Magnets for basically $5, which is pretty good.

Math: The more we do from the Math Expressions book the more I like it. This week we did two things. We used felt tiles to show 4.



He put up 4 tiles in different shapes - they were still 4, no matter how he arranged them. We talked about partners in 4 in his different arrangements. And when it was all done he had a blast scratching all the tiles down. We'll be working with the other numbers 1-5 in the next while, but 4 is hid favorite, so of course we had to do it first.

For our other math activity, also from the Math Expressions book, we took our sidewalk chalk and went outside to make Math Monsters. Happily, Raven loves to be outside already, so he was a happy camper while were playing. As an added bonus, there was just enough wind to keep the mosquitoes off. Those things are so nasty this year, it feels like a sting, more than just a bite!



The idea is to have the child draw a monster that has a specific number of body parts. I knew this would be a challenge for his fine-motor skills, which is part of why I decided to do it in chalk: I was hoping to move into a more gross-motor direction with it. We also were in need of some outside time, so this worked well.



This particular afternoon, Monkey was all about the light sabers, and not so much into the chalk, so I started by drawing the monster on the left. He, of course, wanted to know what was I doing. So then we did the second one together. He gave instructions, counted parts, and drew the eyes while I was coloring the face. I think they both turned out cute.

Read-Aloud: I finally found Charlotte's Web; it'd gotten put away... on the wrong bookshelf. So we're making progress there again. We're also making progress on the New Testament again as well. I'm working on a Four Gospels reading chart to track our progress.

Weekly Wrap-up: The Late One

We tried out Postcrossing this week, and I'm really excited. I think that once the postcards start coming in from around the world Monkey will too. Plus, he loves the globe we got. For our first card, sent to Malaysia, we looked at Google Maps (he loves google maps), & printed a copy for a geography binder, put a sticker on our wall map, and found Malaysia on the new globe. We also got a sort of social studies atlas that we looked up Malaysia in - did you know they sometimes have floating markets? Sort of a grocery store on the river? Plus we also watched this travel clip.


Phonics we did, but in an easy-going way. Nothing exciting happened here.

Math went well too. The lessons we're working on right now are shape-heavy, which is fun. We've done a couple different shape drawings, including a cute circle monster, but I didn't get any pictures.

Probably the most fun of the week was building a new science binder and doing some more experiments. We've been playing with vinegar again, this time adding salt to clean up some pennies. He also did a narration for it and one the floaters and sinkers experiment we did late last week. Plus, he's had "science" in almost every bath since then. Gotta love requests for repeats! Looks like the pennies are something he also is going to want to revisit.





We also made some craisins dance.



This ended the first two weeks for my new planning schedule thingamajigs, and so far it seems to be working nicely. I'm learning that I'll need to be more organized about having things ready to go. Getting things ready to go currently uses up a bunch of our time. I'm going to need to both adjust my expectations of how long this is going to take in any given day and also become better at being ready to go so the transitions are smoother. I'm beginning to understand more clearly why people talk about homeschooling as a lifestyle: it's going to be a huge part of what I do.

My other cutie fell asleep in the high chair, and knowing that I wasn't going to be able to move him, I let him snooze... and snapped a few pictures. No, that's not snot by his nose. I think it's a bit of the biter biscuit he was working on. Still gross, but I'm such a sucker for his chubby little self that I didn't even notice until I looked at the pictures!