Flying Fox Academy: March 2011

Friday, March 18, 2011

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.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Week 25

"If I punch open the hummus, my fist would displace the same amount of hummus all over the room!" We had fun with science this week. The same girl tried to turn a spoon into a lever and catapult a Brussels sprout across the room. We added in a new science program to supplement R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey. Basically, the kids watch videos at the beginning of the unit, we read the text and do some (or none) of the experiments. This week we learned about force, gravity, and friction. We did some very simple experiments and learned that two objects of different weight will fall at the same rate of speed.

The girls sorted rocks by size, color, texture and weight.

Emily will be starting Singapore 3A soon. In the meantime we've been playing lots of math games dealing with fractions, telling time, and skip counting.
Cami's almost finished with RightStart A and will be moving on to B after that. She's learned to tell time to the hour and half hour and practiced measuring using non-standard forms of measurement like paper clips and color tiles. She's also getting pretty good at addition with answers up to 100.

Emily's up to lesson 47 in First Language Lessons 3. She's learned about predicate nominatives, predicate adjectives, and direct objects, among other things. Cami's starting to join in when we say the definitions so I think this will be a breeze for her in a couple years.

Cami's up to page 110 in Phonics Pathways. Her speed has increased so much the last few weeks. She also does two pages of Explode the Code 2 every day. Here's a sample of her writing.

We learned about knights and samurai in Story of the World this week. Here are the girls' narrations.

Emily:
"Knights were mostly good at fighting. They raided monasteries and stole from churches. Then there was a new law that was called The Code of Chivalry. Knights had to take care of women, orphans, children, and their king."

Cami:
"When it was a peaceful time, the samurai in Japan would dance and paint art and make poetry. When it was wartime, they would fight."

The girls have really been into presidents lately. They love looking through and organizing their flashcards and quizzing me on the facts. It's really raised some pretty cool discussions about American history. When we learn a new president, we read about him in Time for Kids: Presidents of the United States and add a page to our presidents scrapbook.

Our memory work this week included skip counting by 2s, 3s, 5s, and 10s, presidents 1-8, states and capitals, and our new poem, "A Time to Talk" by Robert Frost.

Oh yeah, and the little guy took his first steps.