First Week of K4

Cricket and I had a great first week of school this year. Our daily learning has changed some from last year, first Cricket has to tell me the password of the day to enter the room. Cricket absolutely LOVES this addition to our room. Then she goes to her bean bag chair to read with her Tag Reader or look at easy readers, this is to give me time to prep for the day. After that I read with her. Cricket's next favorite addition to our room is our Tell Me About Today chart that Mimi got us. She is doing really well with it, and I hope it will help her with learning her teens.

Finally, we move to our table to do our other daily board, which includes weather tracking, build the day, 10 commandments, the pledge of allegiance, and two songs. As you can see Cricket wants to do this herself, as should be expected, so I might need to move it.

From here I let Cricket pick which subject she would like to work on next. Here is what we did this week.

I am using the You Can Read! program from 1+1+1=1. Cricket really enjoyed a lot of the activities, but her favorites by far were bingo and making words from play-doh. 

I had her color and trace each word then we cut them apart and taped them to each other back to back to make a flashcard. She liked these, because she made them.

As a note, when we did the funny fonts sheet and bingo I had Cricket say the word each time so in addition to matching the text she actually reviewed and read it out loud each time.

Here is my only problem with the program; I am not succeeding with it. We are doing all the activities well, but I am struggling with teaching Cricket to read. I wanted more guidance, since failing here is my biggest fear so I ordered this book, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, that I have seen highly recommended.

We did manage to add five words to the Word Wall this week: Cricket's name, cat, dog, a, and see.

Cricket has absolutely loved our math curriculum. She is breezing through it so far and did extra lessons twice this week. It seems to be her favorite subject, which might spell future trouble for mommy. She really enjoyed the counting game/activity that we did. I would write a number and she would get that many hearts (any counter could be used). This was great for written number identification, addition, and subtraction. I wrote the numbers randomly and instead of starting over with none each time Cricket choose to add or subtract from what she had. In fact she thought it was so much fun she decided I needed a turn too, so Cricket wrote a few higher numbers for me to do. When I took my turn I counted by twos to work on skip counting.

Her second favorite math activity was simple sequencing.
 

We are using Expedition Earth by Confessions of a Homeschooler and we are both really excited about it. This week was an introduction and overview. I began with something familiar and had Cricket look at and play with her Leap Frog Globe. With it I reviewed land forms and oceans, and introduced the continents.

From there we used the map from Expedition Earth and labeled the continents, then Cricket wanted to color it to match the continent colors on the globe. As we did this and as we reviewed the map all week Cricket kept saying that she wants to "travel ALL over the world except for Antarctica because it's too cold there". 

Cricket got to decorate what will be our prayer box, and we read Matthew 28:18-20 and prayed together. She really liked getting her passport to learning, and is super excited about our adventure. 

Cricket and I began working on a time capsule this week that we plan on burying in Mimi's yard to be dug up when Cricket graduates from high school. There were many opportunities for drawing within this as well as some creative writing. I will share pictures next week as we complete this. 

Daddy's birthday was also this week, and Cricket had to make him a card.

I began the week by completing an assessment from 1+1+1=1. Cricket did really well with it, and we only need to review a couple of things from last year. Below you will see what was supposed to be a color matching sheet, but since I messed up and printed it with black ink it was a little more challenging. Cricket was asked to fill in the circle with the color that the object should be. Due to this she ended up with a white cloud instead a blue one.

  
Between lessons and to burn off toddler steam Cricket likes to play a little basketball or bang on her drums. 

 

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