Weekly Wrap-Up: Sept. 26-30

I'm linking up to Kris' Weekly Wrap-Up.  I like the idea of summarizing our week here on the blog, but I haven't been able to pull it off very often. Our weeks feel very full and busy.  I am now teaching 9 piano lessons a week and three Kindermusik classes.  It is a great way to make extra money from home, but it does take up a lot of my "spare" (haha) time.  I realize that I am not taking many photos of our day to day learning that is not "project" related.  I guess that's okay.  I'm including quite a few photos in my other posts throughout the week.

SC (the 4th grader) has just finished reading The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden.  What a great story!!  I can't tell you how many times he's asked me today if I think Chester the cricket will ever come back to New York to visit Tucker, Harry and the Bellini family.  I love it that he's asking this, because it shows me that he really connected with the characters in this story.  One of my biggest goals for him in reading this year was to get him to love reading fiction.  I think we're getting there.  I think it's a sure sign of a great book when the reader is left yearning to learn what happens next.  SC is going to finish up a final project with this book and I'll be writing a post this weekend (hopefully) to detail our learning with this book.  This week SC has also started doing some lessons in Easy Grammar.  He does Handwriting Without Tears cursive twice a week as well.  He is enjoying our history and science curricula so I'm glad we've made a switch there.  In math, he's busy working with fractions and we are both loving the Right-Start materials and lessons.  He and I will also go on a field trip tomorrow that's only for 4th graders and up.  I'm looking forward to that special time with him.


LG (the 1st grader) has been following our new format for reading (I wrote about it HERE).  He read a leveled reader about camping and we pulled out some skill work with that book including work with contractions.  I read the book Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping to him and together we completed a story map.  He's also worked on his sight words each day and does Handwriting Without Tears twice a week.  He finished his Lego Mini-Figures book, so we'll start a new on-going writing project next week.  In math LG has been working on reading and representing 4-digit numbers.  LG has not been very into the new science curriculum and it's intended for 2nd through 5th grade, so he is a bit young for it.  I purchased the Real Science Odyssey Life curriculum which is more for his age group and I may start doing that with him on his own a couple of times a week and just have him sit in on the Chemistry labs, but not complete the lab sheets.

As I posted earlier this week, we did the first chapter of The Story of the World this week.  We learned about nomads and did some cave paintings.  See THIS POST for the details.