With Mathieu having Tuesday off, we started our week with a trip to the Monterey Aquarium. We spent extra time with the octopus and his 8 legs, and petting the sea stars. The kids also got to pet a bat ray. (fyi it's super slimy and gross)
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| Nehemiah working on "Handwriting without Tears" |
The rest of the week we started our regular curriculum. We start our day with prayer and a bible lesson or two from "The Children's Bible in 365 Stories". We like this bible story book because the writing is very detailed and has lots of not so common bible stories. We had already been doing "Handwriting without Tears" but now we are implementing more activities with handwriting. For math, we are using "Developmental Math". It's very slow paced but really concentrates on knowing the activity before moving on. Nehemiah is moving very quickly through lvl one. Lvl one mainly works on knowing your numbers and "one and one more make 2, ect" We started with this one mainly because he is still having difficuly writing his numbers correctly. For learning to read we are using "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 easy Lessons" and "Bob Books Read and Listen and Learn Set 1: Beginning Readers 1-4". After the first day of school, Nehemiah was able to read the first story in this book. He was super excited and by the end of the week he could read stories one and two quite easily.
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Natasha proudly showing off her work.
Natasha is participating in school too. She is doing 3 worksheets a day from a kindergarten workbook I found at Costco. She is also working on "Developmental Math lvl 1" and "Handwriting Without Tears". Natasha is very eager to learn with Nehemiah and likes being able to do some of the same work as him.
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| Rachel coloring a "Hello Kitty" page |
Rachel takes the opportunity to color during school time. She often colors several pages while sitting very quietly while the others are learning. She also participates in our "Handwriting Without Tears" activities such as, 'Mat Man' and flash cards.
The rest of our time is spent playing and learning as we live our lives. Nehemiah learned to crack eggs this week as well as how to make toast. He loves to find a reason for either one of these things to happen at meal time.
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| Decorating their hats. |
This week for Church was round up Sunday so we made our own cowboy hats to wear to church.
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| Headed to church. Notice Nehemiah's gun in his pocket and the rope over Natasha's shoulder. |
Nehemiah is also involved in Soccer for fun and we get to count it as physical education. Nehemiah, Natasha, and Rachel are also involved in Awana Clubs, where they are encouraged to memorize scripture.
As we establish our daily school routines, we plan on adding more of what they like to learn about and taking out what isn't working.
Nehemiah loves to show off his reading skills to anyone who will listen. We have recently noticed though that he pretty much has the book memorized and is no longer reading the words but just saying everything by memory. We decided to make flash cards with the words from his Bob Books that he has already read. We try and make the cards into much as a game as possible. Nehemiah is so eager to read that he gets angry with himself when he can't read as fast as he would like to. We hope that by seeing the words outside the book, like on the flash cards or while we are out and about on signs, that he will realize that he can read much more than he thinks. Mathieu has started having him sound out the words when we go to the store, even if he doesn't know the word yet. Nehemiah's face lights up when he realizes that he just read a word.
