This week was our last week working with animal tales. I chose two Jataka Tales to tell this week. Next week we will be working around the theme of Thanksgiving, and then we will be into December! Wow! We will cover Saint Nicholas and Saint Lucia the beginning of December and then take it easy the last two weeks to get ready for Christmas. Once we get started back up in January, we will dive into math. We will be covering time, working in from the year, to the seasons, to the days of the week, to telling time. We will also cover money values and times tables before the year is over.
On Monday, we took our walk and came in and wrote our "thankful for" leaves (we did this every day this week). I am adding some new activities for Grant, too. We will be doing something different everyday of the week. My plan is to alternate days with small, fine motor movements with days of big, gross motor movements. On Mondays, he will be working with clay, or play dough, to make a certain shape. He started with modeling a ball just using the fingertips of both hands, next Monday he will model a ball using only his writing hand, then using his non-writing hand, then he will do that same progression behind his back. Once he has done all of that, he will move onto modeling a cube in the same way.
We reviewed math with a bean bag toss. This week I gave him a number, and he had to tell me one way to get that number using plus, minus, times or divide.
After the math review, we did our penny whistle lesson.
Once we were done with that, I told Grant the story of The Talkative Turtle.
We drew our pictures from the story:
Mom's Picture
Grant's Picture
After we drew our pictures, Grant practiced the form drawing for this week, and then did some reading.
At lunch, we tried pomegranate for the first time. The kids had some mixed feelings about it, they thought is was a little too tart at first, but the girls warmed up to it and ate quite a bit.
On Tuesdays, Grant's activity will be jump roping. We will make it a little more challenging by having him clap, touch the ground, turn around, etc.
After we were done with math review, penny whistle lesson and jump roping, Grant retold me the story from yesterday and we came up with a summary. Grant copied the summary.
After that, he did some LA exercises on the board. He circled all the words with a "th" combination and underlined all the words with a "t".
Boji and Julia were hanging out while we were working on this.
On Wednesdays, We are going to do string games, or cat's cradle. Grant really enjoyed learning this new skill, too. We are going to start with a simple design called Jacob's ladder. I think it will take him a few weeks to get it down.
Afterward, I told Grant the story of The Foolish, Timid Rabbit.
Then, hey guess what? We drew our pictures.
Mom's Picture
Grant's Picture
We finished up the morning with some form drawing practice, and reading.
We wrote out our thankful leaves again, and the things Grant was thankful for continued onto the chalkboard.
The only words he asked me how to spell were Julia and Johanna. The rest he wrote by himself.
On Thursday, we walked out our form drawing and did some zoo-robics. We did some baby and big frog jumps, and inch worm walking.
Afterward, Grant re-told the story from yesterday using some of our wooden animals, then we summarized the story, and he copied it.
He had a couple dino friends helping him out.
Once he was finished we did some LA exercises on the board.
After he read it, I erased some of the words and he filled them back in.
Grant also acted out the punctuation we talked about last week. I wrote out these sentences:
Grant was walking while I read them out loud, and then when I said, "period", "exclamation mark", etc. He acted them out.
On Thursday evening, we took Grandpa Paul out to dinner for his Birthday. We went to Texas Roadhouse, where they enjoy making the Birth-dee sit on a saddle, while they announce to all tables within ear shot that it is "Paul's 67th Birthday" and they ask for everyone to join in and wish him a Happy Birthday.
All the kids had to try it out, too.
On Friday, I read the kids this book:
and we painted our October quilt squares.
Grant and Johanna had a little altercation on Friday morning, and Grant wrote out this letter, all on his own, for Johanna. Isn't it sweet? There are a lot of mis-spelled words, but I thought it was great that he took the initiative to write this out by himself.
Grant also finished knitting his penny whistle case a few weeks ago. I got it sewed up, and here it is: Go Grant!
He knitted this with only the knit stitch. Now I am going to teach him how to do the purl stitch. I need to find a new simple project that he can do using both stitches. We will probably start on that after the start of the year, since our handwork for the next month will focus on finishing up the Christmas presents we are working on together for the girls.
