Another successful week of school

I guess it really depends on your definition of success. My thoughts are if we had some fun this week and learned a little something along the way, then we did good this week on this crazy journey of homeschooling. With all of the Halloween activities , sugar, missed naps and now runny noses, I think we were pretty darn successful this week.
We added The Trumpet of the Swan to Joshua's book bug. This summer he came up with an idea to try to keep a record of all the chapter books we read together at night. Every time we finish a book together, we had another part to the bug. Joshua picked another Beverly Cleary book up from the library this week, so we are back to reading from the Mouse and the Motorcycle series.

We've been learning about authors and illustrators. Joshua was an author and an illustrator this week writing a book all about himself.

He was asked to draw a picture of his family.

This is the page of his favorite animals. He really wants a dog and a horse right now. We are in no position to add any more living creatures to our family. I'm already worried about how Meow-Meow is going to handle the trip back across the country with us.

These are my favorite foods. Grilled cheese, peanut butter and jelly, pickles and strawberries.

When he grows up he would like to fly airplanes and space ships. He told me he is going to be a pilot and an astronaut.

We love to go to the touch tank. It is a great place to sneak in lessons about counting, colors, touch, being quiet in a public place, etc. Joshua just likes to go to check out the big crabs.

This week our science lessons finished up with talking about the differences between a baby and a 5 year old. We are now introducing the 5 senses. We are learning about sight. In a few days we will start to learn about touch.

For history, we finished our studies on the continents and map reading. We are now moving into learning about our country. In the next few days we will be learning about the American Flag.

Math remains non-challenging, but still fun. This week we did many sorting activities and played a lot of games - Hi Ho Cherry-O, Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land are the top three favorites right now. Hullabaloo is another big hit, but totally unrelated to math or numbers.

Joshua's reading skills are coming along great. His curriculum includes some phonetic awareness activities such as rhyming. Then we read together a few Dr. Seuss books. They make my head spin, but Joshua really enjoys them.

Our vocabulary words this week focused around describing things - big, huge, jumbo, enormous, wee, tiny, itsy-bitsy. It was fun to see Joshua trying to work those words into his conversations this week.

Joshua isn't the only one learning stuff this week. Friday afternoon I was trying to take a nap on the couch and Daniel climbed up on me and sat on my stomach. He was really interested in the crabs on my sweatshirt and then he counted them "one, two, three, four, five crabs. Five crabs, Mommy". I was quite surprised. He walked into the kitchen Saturday night and was playing with the refrigerator magnets while I was cooking dinner. Joshua was pressing me to try to get a snack out of me and I told him no, it was too close to dinner. Then he proceeded to push the issue. I use 1,2,3 Magic pretty regularly with the kids, so when I turned around and said "That's 1", Daniel followed up with, "2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10" getting louder with each number until he was yelling and clapping with 10. He can't show me with his fingers how old he is (he keeps holding up 3 instead of 2), but he can count to 10. Now, here comes the tricky part, if I ask him to count to ten, he looks at me as if to say, "I am not a performer".

Speaking of performers, I am a little surprised at the number of rehearsals Megan has to attend for her performance in the Nutcracker. Mind you, she is a bunny...not Clara, Fritz, the mouse or the Nutcracker itself. A bunny. Seriously, they are three year olds, we all know they are not going to get it right anyway. They will attempt to sashay across the stage, point their toes a few times, shake their bunny tales and sashay off the stage in the other direction. The rational person in me knows that the rehearsals are to get them used to performing on the stage. The crazy busy, mother of 3, part-time student in me is feeling a little overwhelmed by the rehearsal schedule. But it will be fun and after all it is the Nutcracker. I have so many fond memories of my elementary school years where we would dress up and take a field trip to watch one of the final costumed dress rehearsals the day before opening night of the Nutcracker. It was a big deal to take the bus into Boston and go to the Wang center. I'm tempted to Netflix the Nutcracker so Megan can watch it and see what it is all about, but there is something so much more magical about it in person. She performs Saturday the 8th of December at 7pm and Sunday the 9th at 2pm.