First Week of School

Well, our first week of school has come and gone. The first three days were pretty overwhelming for me, partly due to two doctor's appointments that we had to go to. We accomplished all of the things that I consider "must-dos" including phonics, math, handwriting and reading practice. We also "rowed" our first Five in a Row book, "How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World." Monday we did Social Studies and we got to visit Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Italy, France and England. We studied Sri Lanka as our country of the week, coloring pictures of the flag, looking online at pictures of Sri Lankan brides and weddings, listening to the Sinhalese language and learning about how to get cinnamon from the native Kurundu trees. We study the countries through the Window on the World book so we get to learn about prayer needs and other religious issues. Tuesday is our Language Arts day. I had picked out four new vocabulary words from "Apple Pie" and I helped Elyse look up the words in a dictionary, teaching her about alphabetical order. She wrote the name on an index card, I copied the definition and then she drew a picture describing the word on the index card. Here's a picture of her interpretation of ingredients: an egg, an apple, salt, a stick of butter and a pie crust (for an apple pie, of course!) and native: the kurundu tree of Sri Lanka.



On Wednesday, we studied art and we created our own street scenes akin to "Apple Pie's" first and last pages. Thursday was Math day and we made an apple pie, talking about math as we measured the ingredients and cut the pie! We studied Science on Friday and we talked about evaporation. We put salt water in a pan and put it on the back porch and let the sun do it's magic to leave behind the salt. This is just what the character in the book did to get her salt for her apple pie!

With Aidan I'm also doing a little bit of the Letter of the Week curriculum, so we studied Cows, the letter A, the number 1 and the shape of a square. On the following picture you can see the bulletin board with our Sri Lanka information, the street scene creations, as well as their interpretations of a cow made out of squares.



By Thursday and Friday, I think we had gotten into the swing of things and all seemed to go smoothly. They're enjoying all the different books we're reading, including our current read-aloud, "The Little Princess." I'm still wanting to add in a little drawing time for Elyse, a few minutes of conversational French, and a more structured piano time for both of them, since piano time is their favorite!