Week Five: Dome of the Rock and Lots of Science

Well, we certainly fit a lot into this week!  We finished our core subjects each day and did tons of extras.

Math

Emily's been slowly working on her Math Mammoth unit on telling time.  She's also been doing lots of tricky word problems in Singapore Intensive Practice.  At the beginning of the week she was just flying through her work, but she got almost every one wrong!  I made her go back and read each problem over again to see what, exactly, they were asking her to find.  She's doing much better now but I do have to sit with her and guide her through the trickier ones.

Cami completed lessons 31 and 32 in RightStart this week.  She's getting pretty good at identifying coins and counting money.  She also learned a few new shapes and reviewed some old ones.  We played around with paper ellipses, hexagons, pentagons, octagons, semicircles, and parallelograms, and practiced dividing them into halves.  Emily sat in on this activity as a refresher.

The girls played lots of RightStart card games, which we all love.  This tournament was overseen by a fair and impartial judge:

Phonics/Reading

  

I'm sad to report Cami's outgrown McGruffy Phonics K.  I've looked through the whole program and she's miles beyond even the last lesson.  At this point it just feels like busywork.  We've moved on to Explode the Code 2 and we're also using Phonics Pathways, which she loves.

Emily finished reading Prince Caspian and started both Ribsy and Gulliver's Travels, Classic Starts edition.  I don't really read any abridged classics to the girls but have no problem with them reading them on their own. 

History

We didn't start a new chapter of Story of the World.  We had one last project to wrap up from last week.  I am so glad we did.  The girls were so proud of their hard work!

We finally finished our model Dome of the Rock.  The Dome of the Rock is a Muslim shrine in Jerusalem.  It's the oldest Islamic monument standing today.

The girls had a lot of fun with this.  When we started, Cami asked, "Will this be edible?"  Ha ha, I guess we have been doing a lot of edible history projects lately.  First our graham cracker/M&M mosaic, then our oasis.  When we finished, Cami decided that it had been fun after all.  She said, "This was our funnest history lesson ever, even though we couldn't eat it!"

Art

We worked on shapes in art this week to go along with Cami's math lessons.  They did a shape search and recorded their findings.

Science

In science we learned that air is not just empty space.  We did lots of experiments this week.  We crumpled paper and put in it the bottom of a glass, then turned the glass upside down and dunked it in a bowl of water, leaving the paper dry.

The girls had fun "pouring air".

We made art with watered down paint and straws.

We made pinwheels and gliders and tested them out at the park on Friday.   Cami's going through this weird phase where she poses like a princess in all her pictures.  I have to be sneaky and take it when she least expects it if I want to get a real smile.

And of course, our week wouldn't be complete without sailboat races in our baby tub. 

It was a good week.