Wordless Wednesday - Pumpkin Patch

We met our Reading Goal!!!

 

To go with Expedition Earth for Kenya:

Masai and I by: Virginia Kroll - This was a great comparison and contrast style story written from a young girl's view point. It was an excellent way to introduce the Masai and their culture. 


Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain by: Verna Aardema - This was a folk tale style story about well bringing the rain to the Kapiti Plain. It ended up being a stretch for Cricket to follow what seemed to be a realistic tale into the folk style of things. I also felt the ever growing yet completely repetitious tale was monotonous.

Pleasure Books: 
Charlie the Ranch Dog by Ree Drummond - I ADORED this book. The basset hound was absolutely adorable as a character and the drawings were excellent. Cricket enjoyed the story as well, and I would personally love to add this book to our personal collection.
 
Whoo's There?: A Bedtime Shadow Book - This is not so much a story book as an experience or activity book. Cricket loves to look at the flashlight pictures though and talk about the images. It's a fantastic concept.



Sunset of the Sabertooth (Magic Tree House, No. 7) - As I have said before Cricket is in love with the Magic Tree House books, and we were thrilled to finally get our hands on book number 7. I am always impressed with how well Cricket keeps up with the story, how engaged she is when we are reading, and her insight into the books. Cricket really liked the wooly mammoth in this book and other elements of the ice age tale.

Bedtime Books (That we haven't already counted):

The Berenstain Bears Trick or Treat
Halloween Hats
Pick a Pumpkin, Mrs. Millie
The Berenstain Bears and the Broken Piggy Bank
Olivia Forms a Band

That makes 201 books total so far for 2011. WOOHOO!!! We surpassed our 200 book goal, but we will continue reading through the year of course. I highly recommend joining in at the Read to Me Picture Book Challenge.

You should also see what others are reading this week at Mouse Grows Mouse Learns. 

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Super Reading Week

Cricket did amazing this week. She actually read these three of the four sentence searches all by herself to me, and repeated the work for her Dad and Mimi. I was so proud of her it actually made me tear up.

From 1+1+1=1

Horizons is putting more and more addition and other more difficult work into the book, and Cricket is taking most of it in stride. She did awesome with the addition this week. 

The only thing that threw her was that in a lesson while we were working on counting by tens they threw in ten dollar bills. This was my first dislike for Horizons. They have gradually introduced pennies, nickles, and dimes, their worth, and how to write cent amounts. We have not worked on dollar amounts at all yet though and there was really no explanation of it. It was just expected that you knew it's worth and how to write it.
 

This week we began our journey into Africa with a study of Kenya. Once again we actually had a people around the world image up on our wall for Kenya. Cricket enjoys having this connection, and she was really excited about starting a new continent. To kick things off we did this continent hop from Spell Outloud. It was good exposure to all the continent names, and Cricket enjoyed the game aspect of it.

Cricket recognized saying Jambo for hello from Dora, so this clicked with her well. She did a decent job this week of copying the Kenya flag and not getting "creative". 

This week we were finally able to enjoy our newly rebuilt deck, and Cricket spent time out there observing the change in weather. She really enjoyed collecting and comparing leaves. 

We also really enjoyed just being able to open the door and observe the weather for our tracking sheet. 

This week Cricket did a string art project, and I was reminded yet again that my princess is not a fan of the messy. She enjoyed putting the yarn on paper and the final result, but she did not like pulling the paint soaked yarn out of the paper. I used tempera paint, and I wished I used a better paint because the colors didn't mix or blend as well as I would have liked them to.

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Check out what others are doing at this amazing site:
 

Finishing up South America and more

Our calendar work is going really well and Cricket is grasping days of the week well. She does best when associating each day with an activity.

Cricket is really enjoying the resources from 1+1+1=1 and things are starting to click for her. I think bingo was her favorite this week. She does a great job reading the words for this fun game, without realizing she's working on something. 

 

We continued our Horizons work and we also finished up our September weather graph and discussed it. I talked to her about how to read the graph and compared the results. She reported the most common and least common types of weather we had. 

 

Cricket has done really well with our journey to South America, and I have loved the resources from Expedition Earth. This week we studied Argentina and Cricket was tickled that we were finally studying one of the people from around the world on our wall. 

Here is a look at our country info that I had out for her this week.

We also did a couple of puzzles this week as we wrapped up our South America study. Mimi gave us both of these puzzles (thank you). One is a great Melissa and Doug Rain Forest puzzle, and the other one is a book of puzzles we did the South America puzzle.

  

After the library we made a mini trip to the Master Gardener's vegetable garden. Cricket loves wandering through and observing the different types of plants and vegetables. She even did a pretty good job of classifying them this time. I was really surprised by how many she knew. 

Cricket did several small art project this week. This is definitely a weakness of mine, but I'm desperately trying to feed her interest. I introduced a new art supply, oil pastels, and they went over pretty well. 

I used them for my sample art project, but she chose to use markers instead. The abstract drawing ended up being sort of a flop overall though. 

My sample

Her Creation

Cricket preferred this color mixing project, but miss perfection wanted lots of help with it. She had me outline the whole thing so she wouldn't go outside the lines.

Cricket continues with her gymnastics and is progressing in her skills. She has a new love though! She is super excited about ballet so far, and I adore watching her.

Check out Cricket's adorable new desk (supplied lovingly by Mimi and Papa). She has really enjoyed the chalkboard top and likes having another place to do her work. The desk was also painted by Mimi to Cricket's specifications =)

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