Second Week Record

Despite starting the week with two sick kids...

Two Sick Kids

Phonics/writing: Reading Reflex 'er' word list with associated lessons (reading of The Hurt Girl). Lots of writing practice with the Nature Journal and Word Bank Cards (about six cards added - nouns and one verb). Both handwriting and phonics are going slowly and are a struggle. Not for ability, but there's a block somewhere. We'll get it in time.

Math: Singapore Earlybird 2A continuing from last week through lesson five. Going smoothly. We might join friends for a lesson next week.

Tapestry: St. Nick can identify the Nile River and Egypt on a world map (which makes two places on a map he can identify - Egypt and our state). We talked about daily life in Egypt and completed the following readings:

Usborne Beginners The Egyptians
Egermeier's Bible Story Book: Creation plus Baby Moses and Jacob and the coat (noting setting of Egypt)
A Place in the Sun: chapters 1-3. I'm not quite sure how much he's getting. But he's tracking with major story elements, which is great.
Modern Rhymes about Ancient Times (Egypt): selections (about half)
Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile (again)
Geography from A to Z

Activities: Lots and lots of online activities. We viewed Egyptian art, pyramids, images, heard Egyptian music all using the links in the previous post here.

We made a salt map and went over landforms using Geography from A to Z. I took pictures, below.


St. Nick, entirely on his own, made a sarcophagus from a paper bag mask and a cardboard box (he understood exactly what he was making and transferred a rather abstract idea into real household objects).

(More photos of this week can be found at: http://smartypants.shutterfly.com)

We also looked at pictures of the World Trade Center bombing and talked about terrorism and patriotism.

Watched a video (several times) on the construction of skyscrapers.

We attended members night at the John Ball Park Zoo - the event was very busy and overwhelming, but fun. St. Nick drew a jellyfish in his Nature Journal.

Science: Did the How do Plants drink activity from Green Thumbs (p. 5), and St. Nick sketched his observations in his Nature Journal.

We transplanted our seeds from last week and continued sketching our observations. We read about seeds and seed parts (shoot and root are firmly established in his vocabulary now) using the Usborne Illustrated Encyclopedia.

Heart: We read Leading Little Ones to God, chapter 2, continued with our scripture memory verse and read much of God's Wisdom for Little Boys.

Etc.: We did just a few minutes of Chinese online. St. Nick washed the bathroom himself (!) and helped to dust/mop.

St. Nick attended his first fencing class on Tuesday which was a huge success!!!