Mind Games

Yet another week was interrupted by illness here! This time it was a sinus infection for JediBoy that threw us for a loop. He started to feel bad after lunch on Tuesday and didn’t really recover until after lunch on Thursday. All of Wednesday he spent in bed, napping and watching PBS. We missed the field trip to a dairy goat farm, something we’d really been looking forward to, and several of our usual fun projects (Unplug Your Kids, THINK!, etc.) also fell by the wayside.

If you’re interested, you can find my summary of the week’s learning notes behind the cut.

Math

• Math-U-See Beta, Lessons 25, 26, 27 and 28: Ordinal Numbers / Tally Marks / Days and Months, Four Digit Subtraction, Subtracting Money, and Five-Digit Subtraction; watching the dvd, doing several practice problems and then the test for each lesson. The three lessons on subtraction were done in one day because they didn’t teach any new skills - subtracting with four or five digits is just like subtracting with three. Only 2 lessons remain in Beta.
• played with coins and dice, guessing results, tallying results, and discussing basic probability
• did some mental math problems from the teacher’s guide

History

• The Story of the World Volume 1: Chapter 15: The Phoenicians, reading and review questions
• map work SP45: Phoenicia, Tyre and Carthage
• discussed glassblowing and what a bellows is, drew a bellows
• recognized the bull’s hide tale from Virgil’s version of the founding of Carthage as a tale he read in History Dudes: Vikings about Ivar the Boneless - a connection I hadn’t made - so we spent time reading about the Vikings as well (we found a bellows in this book too!)
• read from The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia on Phoenicia
• made (stinky) purple dye from red cabbage and dyed a shirt and a playcloth with the dye

Science: Dairy Goats

• read a goat fact sheet and answered a few simple questions
• read about 6 breeds of dairy goats (I made up our own fact sheet from information I found here and photos from various sources)
• did a goat word search
• made a “goat catcher” (think Cootie Catcher!) and read the facts and jokes on it - this was surprisingly challenging at first and a good fine motor skill
• watched videos online about goats and making cheese
• colored six copies of a nanny goat coloring sheet to look like the six breeds
• read G is for Goat by Patricia Polacco, The Milk Makers by Gail Gibbons, and Goats by Wilfrid Bronson

Language Arts

• Handwriting Without Tears lowercase words for me p.53 (cow, tow, tot, cot), lowercase a, d and g, 3 capital practice sheets
• read “Paul Bunyan” from Learn to Read With Classic Stories, Grade 2 several times. This was the last story in the workbook, which JediBoy deeply enjoyed. I do have a copy of the Grade 3 book but I’m unsure whether to use that right away or save it for the spring, when his writing skills might be a bit better and allow him to do a bit more of the writing himself.
• completed the worksheets on this story p.281-294 - skills included comprehension (sequencing, characterization, story details, fantasy or reality, main idea), word meaning: story vocabulary, word structure: compound words, phonics: spelling, mechanics: capitalization and punctuation, word meaning: similes
• read Paul Bunyan by Steven Kellogg, Paul Bunyan by Nanci A. Lyman, Paul Bunyan by Brian Gleeson, The Bunyans by Audrey Wood (I loved this one!) and Paul Bunyan Tricks a Dragon by Irwin Shapiro, and discussed the similarities and differences between the versions
• drew a picture of Paul and Babe
• asked about the word “queue” in a book he was reading

Spanish

• learned animal names, completed a worksheet with them

Fitness & Health

• practiced dribbling a basketball (Monday) and had a basketball game (Saturday)
• practiced his white belt kata (every day but Wednesday)
• went to karate on Thursday afternoon
• rained out of his soccer game, but got his trophy!  (Saturday)

Misc.

• enjoyed Muffin Tin Monday: Halloween
• went to the doctor on Tuesday, had a sinus and ear infection
• watched PBS Kids and napped all day Wednesday
• listened to Jim Weiss’s King Arthur and His Knights, Patrick Stewart’s Peter and the Wolf
• enjoyed a game night / pasta party with lots of friends - Cousin ChooChoo - 18 months, BabyGirl - almost 2, Indy - 4, Anna - 4, SpeedRacer - 6, Nate - 6, Ben - 8, Em - 8, T - 9, and B - 13, and a cast of adoring adults.

Reading

• JediBoy read lots of books on Monday, Tuesday and Friday, including:
• Magic Tree House #20 Dingoes at Dinnertime
• MTH 21 Civil War on Sunday
• MTH 22 Revolutionary War on Wednesday
• MTH 23 Twister on Tuesday
• MTH 24 Earthquake in the Early Morning
• MTH 25 Stage Fright on a Summer Night
• MTH 26 Good Morning, Gorillas
• MTH 27 Thanksgiving on Thursday
• MTH 28 High Tide in Hawaii
• the Sunday comics
• The True Story of Spider-Man
• Henry and Mudge and Grandmother
• Red Fox and His canoe
• History Dudes: Vikings
• Petunia
• Two-in-One Fairy Tales from Africa
• Box and Cox
• MTH Hour of the Olympics
• reading and rereading the Paul Bunyan and goat books, above