End of week update

Back to our first full week of school for the year 2008.

Reading lessons: Joshua has completed through lesson #69 in his 100 lesson reading book. He is reading like a champ, with just a few concepts to fine tune. I need to make him some "sight words" flash cards. Sight words are words that don't sound right if you try to sound them out. Words like: said, of, some and at least a dozen or so more.

Math: Joshua had a Math test this week. (I know that he circled the cup instead of the milk container on his worksheet - I accidently told him to circle the object that holds the least - silly Mommy didn't read the directions!). He got the questions all correct, so he got a sticker and a star. We started an introduction to addition. This week was just some easy adding with objects like apples and bears. Next week has some actual number addition.

Reading Comprehension: We read a two short stories about families - Tortillas and Lullabies and Shoes from Grandpa. We also read an a short article about families. Joshua made a small family tree. The purpose of the family tree exercise was to reinforce that he has a Mom and Dad and that Mom and Dad each have a Mom and Dad, and that some day he'll have a wife and children of his own, and then he'll be the Dad and Keith and I will be the grandparents. So there are no great-grandparents or aunts/uncles or anything like that on the family tree, yet. He'll grasp those concepts in later grades. The flowers have the names of friends on them, since he wanted to include them as parts of the family.
We also studied Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Joshua practiced retelling the story and answered all the reading comprehension questions correctly.

Phonics: focused on writing and using words that start with the letters M,S,T and B.

Vocabulary: Joshua learned to use nouns to list the members of his family.

Music and Games: The focus this week was to learn left from right. Of course this involved lots of silly things like trying to write with our left hands, and jumping on the trampoline and doing the Hokey-Pokey.

Science: We are still learning about the environment, reducing, reusing, and recycling. We wrapped the week up with a few lessons about pollution (threw in an anti-smoking lesson there), and being a litter-bug.

Art: We studied Picasso this week. We usually study more than on artist each week, but Picasso was so interesting, we used him for our biography this week, as well as our art lessons. We studied the Blue Period, as well as Cubism. Joshua drew a picture using shapes (below).


History: This week we learned about Democracy. On the occasion our house is a democracy. We let the kids vote on which movie to watch for family night, or we let them vote on which game to play first on game night. So Joshua understood the whole voting concept. We read Duck for President by Doreece Cronin (who also did Click, Clack, Moo, another book we love).

Geography: We used the U.S. floor puzzle to work on state placement. Then Joshua picked one state to study about. We scored a National Geographic Children's Atlas at the library book sale last year for $1. It is short and sweet and perfect for the elementary school aged kids. Joshua picked Michigan since it had a car on it.