Week 1 Homeschool Review

These posts might end up being long so feel free to skip if you want to but it is a good way for me to keep up records of what we are doing and share different websites and curriculum with those interested. In the future these posting will probably have pictures of whatever activity the kids are working on at the moment. Last year we planted seeds in gelatin to see the roots, built a volcano, put on a play... you get the idea. This first week however has been mostly a review of where we left off last year. We started the Sing, Spell, Read, and Write with the alphabet review at the end of last month and so started in on the raceway lessons. I really like the program better than the "Learn to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" that we did with Eliora. It costs a lot more but instead of one black and white book with letters that don't look the way they normally do we now have songs, books, games, rewards, etc. If you are going to homeschool then why not have it be fun? Eliora is higher up on the lessons and helping me 'teach' Audrey the lower ones. They then play the games together. Eliora also does her sight words on top of that. Audrey will be starting those soon. We also reviewed our first half of the Language Lessons book by Susan Wise Bauer. They now have memorized quite a few poems and can usually pick out a proper and common noun out of sentences. They practice reading comprehension and writing. For math we are using the Singapore books. Math is my both of their favorite subjects which they must get from their Dad. We reviewed our number recognition and how to do addition and subtraction with number sentences, word stories, number lines etc. I picked Singapore because of the way they introduce so many ways of doing the concepts and Eliora can now do most addition problems in her head. I did realize that last year I taught them what the numbers looked like written down but not written out. (8 v. eight) We had a field trip at the end of the week to the Wallisville Lock and Dam which was hot but very cool. It is part of their ecosystem Wilderness Passport series. This one was for the Trinity Bottomlands. They learned that the lock is shaped like two giant pie pieces that each weigh about 20 tons. They open and close to let boats in and out of the Gulf and keep the salt water from going up stream. This lets the people in the area use the river and lake for drinking water. Ben did a geology lesson on how to identify rocks that have been in a stream verse the ocean and they got to see two alligators. We will start our full blown science, history, and art this week and Eliora starts piano next week. In the meantime my laundry is getting really behind....