Week 5 Busy Busy Busy

When asked what her favorite part of this week was, I expected Coco to say the hike at Quail Hollow State Park yesterday. Instead she said it was emailing back and forth with her pen pal DJ. She wrote to him Monday and he responded right away. I love the idea of a pen pal because she is not only making a friend (in this case keeping a long distance friend) but she is learning spelling, writing and the art of conversation. Each letter between the two is less then 6 sentences long but they are a start.

This week with Coco we...
In Explorers (Social Studies) we started our unit on Vasco de Gama. We read a bunch of stories about him, completed a worksheet from www.enchantedlearning.com and posted his card of fun facts on our timeline. We also mapped out his voyage on our giant wall map.

In Language Arts we worked with identifying parts of speech. We used our Language Arts 4 (Laidlaw) and our Scholastic Success 4th Grade Grammar book.

In Math we finished up our Subtraction Review, completing worksheets made on www.theteacherscorner.net. Coco is just not a big fan of math, so I let her use my Expo markers and my hanging white board and she wrote out the problems and completed them on the board. When using the white board, she was considerably better at solving the problems.

In Science we are learning about measurements in Science. We are using our Physical Science book (Holt) and a few pages from her Comprehensive Curriculum Grade 4 book. We also printed a few worksheets from www.instructorweb.com
For fun, Coco picked a random science experiment from her book of experiments and made a volcano! It was simple, messy and fun!

We are still working on finishing the 38 page Stuart Little review. It was due today but we have 6 pages left so we will work on it over the weekend. I found it on www.teacherpayteachers.com for $2 and its perfect for us.

In Journaling this week we wrote about Going to the Fair, Making Coffee (how to), Going to Quail Hollow State Park, and we made cards for my mother, my grandmother and my grandfather. We also made birthday cards for Nacho in art class this week.

For PE this week, we went hiking at Quail Hollow. With 6 families from our homeschool group in attendance, we hiked a little over a mile through the woods. We followed that up by playing on the playground.

Fifi's went very well too!
In Spelling we worked on the colors. We used our 100 Words Your First Grader Should Know workbook and our Comprehensive Curriculum Grade 1 book. We also did some color by numbers.

In Language Arts, we worked on word order in sentences from our Scholastic Success Grammar book and our Comprehensive Curriculum book. We spent a lot of time writing out entire sentences.

In Phonics we worked on ending sounds of words (at, an, in, it...) using our Hooked on Phonics Grade 1 workbook

In Math, we started counting by 2s. We played games(2 4 6 8 who do we appreciate) We also worked with our Scholastic Success Grade 1 Math workbook.

In Science we worked with elephants. We used worksheets from www.enchantedlearning.com and read books about elephants. I found a great graph art project that made an elephant.

In Social Studies, we worked with maps in our Scholastic Success Maps workbook and we also learned about Mabon with our Our Pagan Family workbook.

Fifi also made cards for our family and wrote a short story (with my help) about her family... with pictures!

All in all this was a nice week. We got alot done, got fresh air and exercise, and have the whole weekend ahead of us to just relax!