Ants, Music, The Letter T, Subtraction, and so much more

It has been a while since I have posted. Caleb asked if he could take some time to try to read certain books. He pulled them out and showed me-- they were all over his level, but I was not going to stop him from trying. He was at a good stopping place in math so we spent the week before our vacation with Caleb reading bigger word books. Then we went on vacation to the North Carolina Shore with extended family. We left the day before our flight and visited the Indianapolis Children's Museum. Then Caleb and Simeon flew in an airplane for the first time, saw the ocean for the first time, saw jellyfish, went to an aquarium, made some new friends, and just had many great experiences. Then when we got back Caleb and Simeon both got sick. So our break for Thanksgiving turned into 2 weeks instead of one. This week we got back into the swing of things.

Simeon's letter of the week was T and his number was 6. He also started putting together a couple of three letter words. His favorite one was Tad from the Leapfrog videos. We did some hands on projects to reinforce the letter T sound. He made turtles one out of a coffee filter and the other out of a paper plate. Thank you Refined Metals Academy and Delightful Learning blogsites for the ideas on these turtles. He also baked turkey and T-Rex cookies. Well we cheated a little with the T-Rex cookies as I actually did not have a T-Rex cookie cutter. Instead I had a generic dinosaur cookie cutter so we pretended it was a T-Rex.

Caleb has been struggling to figure out when y sounds like long i and when it sounds like long e at the end of words. So we went back and spent a lot of time reviewing this. He seems to have grasped the concept now. Then we moved on the ch sound. I typically try to combine food and other daily life things with the phonics sounds being learned. So this week we ate grilled CHeese and ate CHili. He also began to do addition problems that can not be done on his fingers. At first he was frustrated by this. However, when he slowed down a little he discovered he was able to do it. Then there was a subtraction problem on his last math sheet. So we will be moving into subtraction soon. Caleb was also thrilled when I pulled out some music and started pointing out the Treble and Bass Clef symbols and introduced the concept of Ta and Tee-tee to develop rhythm in music. He does not have this down yet, but he enjoys practicing it so he will soon.

For science Caleb is using Apologia and we were not going to do this with Simeon yet. However, Simeon wants to be involved so we let him as he wants. This week we started studying about social insects. Specifically we have talked about ants and honeybees so far. Next week it looks like we will study bumble bees and termites. At the beginning of the year Caleb and Simeon both asked if we could study Spanish and Sign Language. I told them both was too much, but they could pick one and we would add some of that one. They chose Spanish. So far we have looked at some greetings, and numbers. This week however, we learned what certain colors are in Spanish. We are learning about art and manners together in a book put out by How Great Thou Art. In this book Miss Annie teaches us lessons on how to be polite. This week Miss Annie challenged us to make it a point to smile more often and she talked about manners when spending the night at someones house. That was timely since Caleb and Simeon are spending the night with their grandparents. We also enjoy eating popcorn and drinking tea, apple cider, hot chocolate or some other treat while Mommy reads from a classic book. We are reading The Jungle Book right now. We have not liked that book as much as some others we have read, but we should finish this coming week and are looking forward to starting The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

As you can see it has been a busy week-- maybe that's why I am tired. We hope you have had a good week and we look forward to sharing more of our homeschooling days in the future.