Another excellent week of homeschool!

We had a fantastic week of school this week. The weather has been gloomy, but at least the rain and wind has been tolerable, allowing us to play outside quite a bit.

We have hit the halfway mark of the reading lessons book. Joshua is really coming along. He sounds out words all the time. In fact, today I was running up to Wal-mart and Keith asked me to bring him back a s-u-b and Joshua sat there for a minute and said, "hey, I want a sub, too.". Yup, our days of spelling things out are limited.

Math is focusing on patterns right now. We also just started using http://www.rainforestmaths.com/. Two days this week, the planned lesson ended up being much too easy for Joshua, so we have decided to forge ahead in search of something a bit more challenging and came across Rainforest Math.

Reading Comprehension is coming along great. We've read many stories this week. One of the stories - Caps of Many Colors was a huge hit. We actually have a episode of Between the Lions (a PBS reading show) on DVD that reviews that story, so we were able to read the story and then watch the DVD. I bought a Between the Lions Christmas ornament last year during the after-Christmas sales. I plan on giving it to Joshua this year. Ordinarily I stay away from those types of ornaments (trendy kids television shows), but this one has a classic look of one of the lions reading a book.

Joshua is also learning about naming words (nouns). We've been creating lists of things - our favorite games to play, different types of animals, etc.

We had a few fun crafts this week - we made 'stained glass' decorations by ironing crayon shavings between two sheets of waxed paper.

Science is discussing healthy habits and important things we must do to take care of our body.

We finished reading Runaway Ralph by Beverly Cleary and added it to our book bug. We are about to start Stuart Little by E.B. White, thanks to Grandma for sending us some great chapter books. I bought a fabulous hard backed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis today at one of the local stores. The pictures are fabulous - not cartoon and not from the movie. I'll be wrapping it up as one of Joshua's Christmas presents.

We studied about Benjamin Franklin today. We learned about his inventions - bifocals, wood stove, the firetruck that holds gallons and gallons of water. We talked a little bit about electricity, since we just finished a unit on storms and lightening. Then we made paper lanterns, which turned out to be a great cutting-on-a-straight-line activity for Joshua.

I finally decided to start doing some Christmas shopping today. I ordered each of the kids a monogrammed robe. Megan's has ballerinas on it, and the boys robes are matching. I picked up a huge box of Melissa and Doug wooden blocks (for half off!) today - there are over 100 different size blocks for building. Daniel loves to build with things and when he runs out of blocks, he finds other things to build with. I got Joshua a huge 50 states floor puzzle today, too. I ordered a 4 pack of puppets for Megan from the same company I'm getting the kids' robes from (Lillian Vernon). Megan and Daniel love to play puppets. This pack comes with a knight, a princess, a king and a horse. I've drawn out a plan for sewing them up a hand-puppet theater. I'm thinking it'll be something that I can hang in the doorway on a tension/cafe style rod. And if that isn't crafty enough - I'm making a felt board and felting out some of our favorite stories, to make things a little more interactive. I'm hoping that will help divert some traffic away from the art easel. I also scored on a beautiful ballerina Christmas ornament for Megan. I'm going to give it to her after her last Nutcracker performance. It is so pretty (and it was drastically marked down due to a flaw of some extra glitter on the ballerina's leg - but hey, it's for a 3 year old, the more glitter the merrier!). I was so excited to find it, since I really wanted to get her a ballerina ornament this year, but not a cheesy Barbie one.

We were watching Annie tonight. Megan loves the Let's Go to the Movies song, and watching the Rockettes perform...I see a trip to New York in our future. Joshua noticed at the very end of the movie, when they are singing the last song about Annie, Daddy Warbucks says "I'm richer than Midas" then Joshua explained to Megan who Midas was, since we read the story about Midas and the Golden touch this week.