Weekly Wrap up

We had a fun week studying the beginning of it all.  Monday we kicked off the week with our First Great Lesson, the Coming of the Universe! We dove right in to our study of Geology and Functional Geography.

I love these 3 part cards with the layers of the Earth from The Helpful Garden. I printed and laminated these last year and my son loved them. This year he found them a bit too easy so he only chose to do them once.

Last year we also made this beautiful model with homemade play dough. I got the idea from this site www.meetthedubiens.com

In studying geology, we explored this beautiful book. A Rock is Lively by Dianna Hutts Aston, is a great book for exploring rocks and minerals. The watercolor paintings in this book are absolutely gorgeous! Here are a few preview pages I found online A Rock Is Lively.

We do math each day. T is not fond of math but he actually does really well with it. I am trying to determine if its possible that he just isn't being challenged enough. Several of the lessons he is doing are included in the overlap between primary and elementary math. I feel the need to have him go through them even if they aren't challenging him because I'm afraid that if we skip too much he will be lost. He actually is just starting on his working charts for all memorization work. I decided to skip the addition strip board because he is far past that stage. I did have him start on the addition finger chart which he found simple but still got a few answers wrong when he rushed through it.

I love these printable working charts from Livable Learning. They have all of the charts for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. They also have printable equations.

We worked on the second working chart which explains the commutative rule. He actually pointed out this rule to me while doing the finger chart but told me that he has known it for "a long time". The commutative rule just means it doesn't matter which order you put the numbers in addition equations. For example 7+8=15 is equal to 8+7=15. We did use the bead bars to do this visually just to be sure that it is memorable, but he only wanted to do this once.

Then he quickly went through the second working chart crossing out the duplicates.

He has been doing the multiplication bead board for over a year now and still has problems with it. I think his biggest issue is counting once he has placed the beads on the board because it is always off by one or two. He moved on to the division bead board last week and declared it "easy" and proceeded to get all of his equations correct. The control of error on this board is more fool proof because the child must count out the number of beads used ahead of time. I have him double check his counting before placing them on the board because I know that he rushes through counting. We have not moved past the static division where all equations come out to a whole number.

Cursive practice has also been big this week. We started over with the same writing practice that he has in primary for print. He has always had some struggles with print writing. I really think he would have done better starting with cursive, but he did his primary years at a local Montessori school which started with print. He has been practicing print and it is better than it was but he is actually excited about cursive. He has been presented with all of his sandpaper letters now and has been working on practicing with chalk. He has tried to use cursive on some of his schoolwork already with his pencil.

We also started the final Harry Potter book The Deathly Hallows which we are really enjoying. I started reading him this series when he was about 4.5 years old. First we read each book and when we've completed a book we watch the movie. It is fun but always a little disappointing because movies are never as good as the books. I love the fact that T will talk about the differences between the book and the movie without any prompting. It shows just how much he is paying attention to the book.

As for reading practice for T, he is working through The Magic Treehouse series.