Weekly Wrap-Up

We had a fun week. Here's a quick re-cap:

Social Studies - Continued our unit on Australia. Sport finished his salt dough map by painting it and labeling important geographical features. (One of these days I'll actually download the pictures from my camera and post them!) We read about Aborigines and watched a lot of didgeridoo videos on You Tube. We also looked at symbols common in aboriginal art and used them to decorate our own didgeridoos made out of paper towel rolls. Sport and Spice had a great time "practicing" their own style of music.

Language Arts - Learned spelling words pulled from this week's science unit; used Australian jokes and a little basketball trivia for copywork, as well as science definitions. I just recently started pulling sports related tidbits off the Internet for the dreaded copywork exercises and they've been a hit so far. Not the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth when the subject comes up.

Science - A big hit this week. We are studying levers, pulleys, and simple machines in our Noeo curriculum. Sport has loved every minute of it. Especially since he got to spend most of the week building levers and pulleys with the Ein-O-Science Mechanics kit.

Spanish - Worked on more household words and body parts.

Math - Finished up adding triple digit #s while carrying more than once. On Friday I broke out a game I found at a thrift store a while back then forgot about called Money, Money by Discovery Toys. I worried it would be too complicated for Spice, but once we started playing I realized it was a very basic game good for all ages. The main idea is to practice making a given amount of money in different ways (example make 31 cents using a quarter, nickel, and penny or three dimes and a penny). Spice needed help of course, but the coins are very realistic looking, so it will help her identify nickels, dimes.... Sport loved it. Definitely worth the 2 bucks I paid!

Reading - In the words of Spice, Sport is a "reading machine." I couldn't begin to list what he's read on his own this past week, but together we worked on more picture books of Australia and he read a couple of chapter books set in Australia, Trouble on the Tracks by Donna Napoli and a Magic Treehouse book. For the first time this year, I also handed him a book about the continent of Australia to read independently then report back with what he'd learned. We didn't get to the report back part until a couple of days later and as usual he proved to be a sponge, soaking up everything he had read. This was much easier than us struggling through it together and a good step toward working more independently next year. We also finished Tomie De Paola's Things Will Never Be the Same (or Everything Looks the Same as Spice often refers to it).