Week of Novmember 13

Gabe's animal house in the woods

We had great week visiting Grandma and Grandpa Meng in Arlington!  On the long drive Lily, Gabe and John took turns using the iPad to practice handwriting, read books and play games.  Gabe and John spent most of Wednesday working in Grandpa's whop building swords, boats, and sanding picture frames.  Lily spent the day with Grandma at work.  Grandmas works for Indian Child Welfare Bureau.  Lily spent the day in her office learning how Grandma helps children whose families are in trouble. The rest of our time was spent visiting with cousins, aunts and uncles and playing in the woods.  Lily and Gabe and their cousin made the best fairy and animal houses in the woods with leaves, sticks and moss!

Week of November 6

We started this week with an appointment with the speech therapist!  Lily definitely needs to work on /s/, /z/, /sh/, and /th/.  The boys will also need to work on /s/.

Lily and Gabe organized a Lego contest with their friends complete with judges and prizes.

We made continued progress in math, spelling, language lessons.  We read about the Indus Valley in history and did some map work and narration.  This week's big project was biome poster for science.  We read about four major biomes (grassland, desert, polar regions, and forest) and made posters of each.  John made one poster with living things for his project.

Week of October 30

We made steady progress with our school work this week.  Everyone made progress with their math with Gabe learning how to measure in inches and John following along with the lesson and measuring his stuffed bear and lizard with 1 inch tiles.
We listened to Story of the World  on CD this week and added narrations and map work about the Babylonians the Gilgamesh to the History Portfolios.
Science focused on oceans this week with reading from the Usborne Encyclopedia of Planet Earth.  We studied in particular ocean currents, the action of waves, coastal erosion and tides.  Lily added a diagram of wave patterns to her science notebook and we performed an experiment about the action of cold and hot water together.

Everyone spent time writing, playing phongram bingo, spelling and reading. Lily completed two novels this week: Heidi and We Free Men.

Gabe learned new moves at Judo and his teacher encouraged John to join the class or to just play with the big exercise balls.  John was too shy but I'm hoping that if we keep taking him and encouraging he'll decide to join.  Lily had two Highland Dance classes this week and learned and memorized the entire Fling.  She worked hard in the days between class practicing.

Finally, we finished the week by watching several short videos about Remembrance Day and Canadian service men, read the story of Sergeant Tommy Prince and went to the Cranbrook Remembrance Day service at Rotary Park.

I also forgot the biggest addition to our learning resources!!  We received our iPad 2 this week and have been having a great time exploring all the great apps. John has been practicing his handwriting with pocketphonics, numbers with Monster Squeeze and reading along with the numerous books on it. I also found a dot to dot app made by the same company as pocketphonics and practices not only numbers but the alphabet and number patterns.  Lily is especially enjoying Rocket Math,  This Day in History, Star Walk and Magic Piano.Gabe has been playing pocketphonics and Rocket Math and reading stories.

Art

All three are working on watercolor paintings of fall trees. I found a great resource for art projects that I'm excited to use again!