Periodically I’ll be providing snapshots of our work week. Currently the girls are working on follow up work from the First Great Lesson, and biome studies as their larger projects, along with work in other areas. Here’s what we got up to in this four-day week:
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Funball has begun making the Fraction Charts. She should have made the first couple of sets of charts earlier, but these present a good way for her to solidify and review her knowledge while making something that will remain a part of our homeschool classroom. We will place each chart in a plastic pocket protector and combine them all into a book or binder of some kind. I hope when she gets to the later charts it will inspire more exploration – she’s not ready to complete the last few charts yet. The highlight of this week’s work was determining how to make the seventh and ninth pieces, since we don’t have fraction circles for those. Out came the Montessori protractor to remind her of the number of angles in a circle – a little division and she was ready to measure out each section by placing her whole circle into the protractor and marking off her angles!
Daisy began both bead bar multiplication work and the subtraction board this week. I’ve been delaying and delaying introducing the subtraction board because she did NOT enjoy the addition strip board – but the subtraction board went quite well! She is beginning to internalize some of the lower number subtraction facts. Bead bar multiplication got interesting for her right around 3×7 and she insisted on writing the rest of the tickets. I’m in no rush for her to complete this work – she can work through each number over quite a few weeks.
In our First Lesson follow up work, Daisy has been browsing our book display (about 50/50 ours vs. library books) and I’ve been reading sections to her. Funball has decided to make models of the planets. This week she calculated their sizes relative to Earth and made her balls from Crayola Model Magic. Once they dry, she’ll be able to paint them. With another family we did Montessori Physical Education’s planet distances lesson (second on the page), and she can go back to this to space her planets out when they are finished.
A while ago I built files for the bi- and tri- nomial cubes and had my dad 3-D print them. I finally finished putting the binomial cube together with stickers and a box this week, so both girls tried it out. Funball will get to using this with calculations later this year.
We had our weekly art and science lessons with our friends, and the kids enjoyed some outside time. As previously mentioned they got to run the relative distances between the planets…and just did a lot of running around. Part of the science lesson this week was to see if they could out run light!
In other work, Daisy worked on some noun classification cards, while Funball helped me test our my new Decimal Fraction Task Cards (blog post here). Daisy worked with both the golden bead materials and stamp game for each of the four operations. Funball took up knitting for the first time (we didn’t get to our sewing lesson this week) and we plan to ask Grandma for tips – she’s pretty much caught up to my knitting level already!
The girls have also been writing – we do Writer’s Workshop three times a week. Mini-lessons this week focused on adding in dialogue, revising our leads, and temporal words. Both are loving the Keys of the Universe albums, so I printed and had those bound this week and am starting to read through them. I’ve also been working on our bead cabinet and will have files available soon. It’s looking great – shame about the fat lip I gave myself installing the top shelf! The kids have decided they want the bead chains hanging, rather than left in their boxes, so that’s my next task.
