School Days - May 2015

Wow, 3 posts in 2 days! I had a lot of pictures to load from my camera. Might as well get them all done!

I did not get any pictures during our school days in May, except the last couple of days. It has been challenging with Swiper. He takes short naps and now he has been taking them later than usual. Once he's down, the race is on to see how much I can present in that short time, so the camera often gets forgotten.

Tes has been working on more reading. She hasn't been drawn to math lately. She is always choosing reading works. She likes the phonetic command cards. We've also been working through the phonogram object box. I change out the phonogram object every time we have class. We've done "ch", "sh", "ar" and "qu". She also chooses some practical life activities here and there like clay and drawing.

Cat continues to read small, short readers and she really enjoys the phonogram commands. We've also continued with geometry. We finished up Congruency, Equivalence and Similarity. I presented Polygons to her the other day, so that is where we are at right now. She hasn't been interested in math lately either. Yesterday she worked on a filler box for Grammar Box 2. The other day we did the second part of the oral noun exercise where she sorts cards into nouns and "not" nouns. I also gave her the Definite and Indefinite Article presentation. Sorry I did not get pictures of any of this!

MJ is finally decently comfortable working on long multiplication problems with the large bead frame. We are ready to move onto either the Bank Game or the Flat Bead Frame. I need to read through the presentations to figure out which one to do first. He is already 8.5 years old and we still aren't finished with the grammar boxes. I finally sorted all the cards for grammar box 7 but we haven't been able to start that yet because I never made the actual grammar box. When all the wood was cut, I somehow missed the pieces for that box...ugh! We tried to make it several weeks ago but the blade on our saw was so dull it was getting stuck in plywood! Well we finally got a new blade so it just needs to get done. He has mostly been working on reading. I've been going over some of the remediation sections in the album.

Here is what we were able to get pictures of the other day:

This is another cd from the Putumayo Presents collection. They have a TON of cds. It's ridiculous. I'm glad there are options though. I bought this one to go with the book below.

I found this book on Amazon, as well as the cd. This book is one from a series. There are several other books on other countries. I like these books because they show one day in the life of a child in that country. In this way it is very relatable to the child. They can see what is the same and what is different. I start out by showing them on our puzzle maps and our globe, where the country is. Then we read the story and then we play the cd. I plan to get the other books as well paired up with cds. 

Oh and here is a really neat aspect of the book! It is also written in the native language of the country. Love it! I still haven't given the 4th great lesson which is Communication in Signs, but this will tie in very neatly with it!

Here Tes is just being silly. She's actually looking for something in one of the bins to follow a command from the phonetic command cards. I think Cat put the stuffed animals in there while she was on the chair.

So I finally gave the presentation The Leaf.

The leaves contain water which is made up of 1 oxygen and 2 hydrogen particles.

The carbon dioxide in the air is made up of 1 carbon and 2 oxygen.

When the sunlight hits the green parts of the leaves, the 2 hydrogen separate from the 1 oxygen in the water molecule. The 2 hydrogen combine with the carbon dioxide to form food for the plant. This leaves the 1 oxygen that gets released into the air. At this point Cat's face brightens up and she exclaims "That's how the plants clean our air for us!!!" I try to keep plants in our home because I'm always telling the kids how we need them to clean the air since we are not outside and there are loads of chemical gases released from just about everything in our home. We don't open the windows too much here in Texas because it is obviously really hot most of the year, so the plants help us to get a bit of fresh air. I'm glad she was able to put that together herself. I didn't know how it worked either until I gave the presentation.

Here is the chart I made for this presentation. This is one of many charts from the elementary albums (Jessica has the image of this chart in her albums). They are called "impressionistic" charts. They are meant to make an impression on the child's mind, not provide accurate scientific information. The kids enjoyed this presentation and I found Cat looking at the chart afterwards for a bit. The molecule set was not part of the presentation but I added it in so they could actually see what I was saying as I was saying it. 

This is the set I used. I found it on Amazon. I think I saw this set used in someone else's blog but I can't remember which one.

This led to Tes watering the plant. She is in primary but she often sits with us when I give "story" type presentations or experiments. She wanted to give the plant water so it can make more food. The presentation says to let the kids go outside to see how the plants try to get sunlight in order to make their food. I had a perfect example in our garden. We use our own compost and most of the time it is not completely composted, so there are always seeds and eggshells in it. When we added compost to our garden, a squash plant started growing near a tomato plant that I had planted. I didn't want to kill it and it was already too big to transplant so I just flipped it out of the garden since it was right at the edge. All the leaves were upside down. Well the next day they were all right side up again. I showed the kids and reminded them of the plant being upside down and how the leaves had now turned straight up. They were able to point out a few things in the yard that were very obviously reaching to the sun.  A hanging basket for example. It is high so I had to point it out to them but I didn't say anything other than "check out the flowers in the basket". They immediately noticed how they were only growing on the side that gets the light, leaving the other side, under the shade, bare. 

Next week we'll be back on track with school. Hopefully I'll be on here more regularly.