Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Week 30

We got our new Singapore books a couple weeks ago.  We're doing everything but the Extra Practice.  I've always thought the biggest drawback of Singapore math is the constant switching back and forth between books.  We actually switched to Math Mammoth for several months because of it, but I missed it so much I just couldn't stay away. 

So I took it to the print shop and had all the binding hacked off.  I put all the pages in the order I wanted them in and had the new books spiral bound.  It took about an hour to arrange each level.  I had to make two workbooks for each kid because it wouldn't all fit in one.  These two books will last one semester for Emily.  

 Each workbook contains pages from the textbook, workbook, Challenging Word Problems, Intensive Practice, and test book.  The pages are in the order suggested in the Home Instructor Guide and, for the first time, we've been doing all the extra activities too.  These new workbooks have made all the difference and once again, I'm in love with Singapore.

Emily had lots of fun doing rock labs this week for science.  She researched and classified nine kinds of rocks. 

We also did a pretty cool experiment that demonstrated how the same minerals can be changed into different kinds of rocks depending on how they're formed.  First we made two identical piles of crayon shavings. 

We held one over a flame for a few seconds, and the other we smashed under a block of wood.  The smooshed crayon shavings showed how sedementary rocks are formed and the melted shavings represented metamorphic rocks.

In history we learned about how the Romans separated the Jews and sent them to different countries to stop them from revolting.  We learned about Passover and Purim and made three different kinds of Charoset.  Cami thought the one with hard-boiled egg in it was weird and wouldn't eat more than a bite.

Cami's been having lots of fun with All About Spelling.  She's on Step 12.  She seems to be a natural speller, like Emily.  Cami loves doodling, drawing hearts and spirals all over her papers, and she always goes back and colors all the pictures in her math book once she's finished her assignments.  So every day we have a spelling test on the whiteboard.  I give her a word, then she makes up one for me.  By the end of the lesson the board's usually full of Cami's hearts and flowers.  She also likes to illustrate the words I give her.  She gets pretty creative with my spelling words.  Yesterday she gave me antidisestablishmentarianism, the longest word in the dictionary. 

We started La Clase Divertida last week.  The girls both love languages.    I got a couple fun Spanish workbooks to go along with what we're studying.

Books we read this week: 

Queen Esther Saves Her People 
Dance, Sing, Remember: A Celebration of Jewish Holidays
My Side of the Mountain

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday: Ian's First Birthday!!

Weeks 26-27

The last two weeks have been kind of a mess.  Last Monday I took Emily to the doctor for allergies only to find out she also had strep throat.  A few days later the whole family had it and Emily had broken into a rash from head to toe due to an apparent amoxicillin allergy. We did manage to fit in some fun schoolwork though.  I was so excited about Pi Day that I pushed through with the activities I planned even though I lost my voice and had to whisper all day.

The girls were very excited about history this week.  We learned about the Crusades.  Emily surprised me by adding in all sorts of facts from books she's read on her own.

The girls made pilgrim badges.

A couple weeks ago they decided to start keeping track of all the different cars they see in a notebook.  They stuck with it for about a week, taking turns making tally marks of the cars while we were out.  I suggested they make a graph when they were finished.  Here's the end result.  Ford won by a landslide, but poor Mazda was sadly underrepresented, with only three sightings.

They learned a lot from this project.  Mainly how to identify each car by its symbol.

Pi Day! We did some pretty cool hands-on activities exploring circles and measuring circumference and diameter.  We also read Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi.
First we used string to measure the circumference of a circular object (of course, a pie).

Then we experimented to find out how many times the diameter could be measured by that amount of string (3 and a little more).  We tried the experiment on circles of different sizes, always coming up with the same answer.

My Side of the Mountain, our current read-aloud, tied in nicely with pi day.  The boy in the book is living in a tree six feet in diameter.  To demonstrate just how big that is, we measured out a six-foot piece of string, laid it on the ground, and took turns lying next to it.  Then Emily used a calculator to figure out the circumference of the tree.  I'm proud to say she figured out how to do it all by herself!  After that, we measured the circumference of a tree in our yard and used pi to find the diameter.  Then we compared the size of our tree with the tree in the story.  Huge difference! 

I ordered All About Spelling for Cami.  Emily finished level one when she was five and we both loved it, but for some reason we never got level two.