My Blessings Homeschool: Homeschool update October 7-11

I didn't have my phone for pictures for a while and what's an update without the fun pictures? So here's our school update.

4th Grade

Geography

We finally had our Mexican fiesta complete with food, pinata and paper flowers. Unfortunately the pinata didn't last long but they had fun anyway.

As we finished our trip to Mexico we traveled North to Canada. For art we made a soap sculpture like the Inuits would have made out of soap stone or wood. It was a group effort with me doing the more detailed parts of our dog sculpture and Chelsea doing the bigger parts. It was pretty fun!

All of the children are really enjoying the Wee Sing Around the World CD. I've tried just having them listen to the song for each week and then the ones we've learned already but it's to no avail! They love hearing them all!

Along with our fun projects and music we continued to work on learning more about North America including a variety of natural landmarks like rivers, lakes, mountains and populations of the countries over the last forty years. Chelsea labeled the Canadian Provinces on a map and we found North America's major cities as well.

Reading/English/Spelling/Writing

We continued reading stories from the A Beka Book Reader Pathways to Adventure as well as practicing phonics skills with their Handbook for Reading.

We are working on the second lesson of Writing strands. She has finished her main idea and written several sentences to answer questions about her topic. The next step this week is to put that information into a paragraph.

We are still using Spelling Power and trucking right along through level B. She still gets quite frustrated at missing words but after last year I know this program works for her so we'll stick with it!

Math

Well, math was causing issues for us once again and Chelsea loves hands on, fun things for learning so I tried something different. I went to Easy Peasy's math page and we tried a lesson there. She loved it! It's got games and videos online and the occasional worksheet of course to practice and learn skills. She really seems to like this so far which makes me quite happy. Last week we practiced telling time, adding and subtracting with regrouping, geometric shapes and rounding.

Science

This week we moved out of the desserts and into the rivers and streams! We read from The Usborne living world encyclopedia about water skaters, plants and fish that live in rivers and tried an experiment about water skaters but I have to admit I really didn't understand how it worked so we didn't get very far.

Kindergarten

This week we learned about Goats and the letter G! We watched some fun videos on You Tube, read library books on farm animals and goats and Hunter was surprised to find goat cheese at the grocery store!

We read The Year At Maple Hill Farm and since it's October Hunter made a picture of a fall tree. We used his hand for the trunk and then he used his fingers to make yellow, red and orange leaves falling and flying from the tree!

We listened to Allegro by Back and Hunter and Natalie both had fun with finger painting to the music. Here is Hunter's creation.

We also played Simon Says which proved quite tricky for Natalie but they had fun acting like a variety of animals.

Preschool

Natalie continues to work in her Rod and Staff work book but we have also started using Easy Peasy's Getting Ready program. She had a blast watching the videos, coloring, cutting out and gluing her April the Alligator (who is a scaredy Cat) Awesome apple and coloring the letter A.