Monday, January 14, 2013

Back to School

This term our class has expanded to included Simon and Sina.  We are all really excited to have them join us two days a week.  The plan is to study grammar, reading, science, math and art together!  I think this will really help me to plan art lessons once a week and to (hopefully) do more hands-on science. 

 We are going to be working through Art Treasury for our art lessons.  The book presents famous paintings, gives a brief biography about the artist and information about the painting.  Then it gives instructions for a project based on the painting.  The projects are not exact replicas; they incorporate strategies used in the original.  This week the painting we looked at was Starry Night by Van Gogh.  The kids then created their own swirly landscape with acrylic paints.

Today we studied animal tracks and other traces of animal's presence and then went exploring to see if we could find any.  We found puppy tracks (Daisy) and our own tracks.  Although we had seen both the cat and squirrels in the yard earlier their tracks had either been covered in new snow or blended into the surroundings.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Pronouns

Simon came over to play today but I wasn't ready to release Gabe to play so after a short break I gathered them together for a language lesson.  We are going to start doing school together two days a week and Simon and Gabe are working through the same grammar book but Simon is a couple lessons behind.  So today I had Gabe do a few handwriting exercises while I taught Simon the lesson on pronouns.  Then they did the dictation exercise together and the above pronoun exercise on the whiteboard.