Kindergarten {Our Fourth Six Weeks}

Our Fourth Six Weeks (March 4-April 12, 2013):

During our two weeks off our family took vacation toNewMexico to enjoy snow sports. It was a 21hr one way road trip with family. The girls experienced snow shoeing for the first time and went sledding.

Bible Study: Marin read aloud daily form ZonderKidz “The Beginner’s Bible” and she completed all of the Old Testament (276 pages). She also memorized all of the books of the New Testament and earned $3 from Awanas for doing so. Having her read aloud from the bible has been effective in helping her understand the bible stories more thoroughly.

Calendar: In her Calendar note book Marin continued to make daily notations on a calendar and practiced writing the date in the correct form, April 1, 2013 and with numbers 04/01/2013. She continued to track the number of days of school numerically and with tally marks.  She updated a weather chart daily and we compared the most and least days of certain types of weather over the last four months. We talked about St. Patrick’s Day and April Fool’s Day. She pulled a prank on her Granny and Pops and had a blast thinking of lighthearted gags. We also observed Easter and completed fun activities to help reiterate the importance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Grab Bag: This concept worked so well we continued to use it these six weeks replacing three of the review topics with new items. These included:

·         Skip count by 10s (eliminated)

·         Skip count by 5s to 100 (eliminated because she does this when counting her tally marks)

·         Count to 100 (eliminated)

·         Learn to tell time (NEW)

·         Learn about Money (NEW)

·         Learn to Tie your Shoe  (NEW)

·         Say and write your phone number

·         Say the months of the year

·         Say and write your address

·         Say the pledge of Allegiance

·         Skip count by 2s to 100

·         Say the days of the weeks

·         Is _____________ a common noun or a proper noun?

·         What is a noun?

·         Family relations quiz. For example (Your mother’s mother is your? ________)

·         Write the letters of the alphabet (Upper and lowercase)

·         Sing the vowel song

·         Write your numbers 0-20

·         Name the five senses

Reading: Completed lessons 80 through 102 of “The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading.” Covering adding S to the ends of words, reviewing long-vowel words, common spellings for the long A sound, vowel pairs and common spellings for the long E sound. Our read aloud selections were “Farmer Boy” (finished from previous six weeks) as well as “The Hundred Dresses.” Marin read her first chapter book “The Box Car Children” aloud to me during reading time. She also read many easy reader selections including “The Frog and Toad Treasury.”

First Language Lessons: We completed Lessons 37 through 48 in “First Language Lessons.” We focused on identifying nouns and drilling family relations. The book covered mailing addresses, days of the week and months of the year, but this was already familiar information for Marin. She memorized “The Months” a Mother Goose Rhyme. We learned what a pronoun was and have begun a list of pronouns that we are working to memorize.

Math: We are currently working in the Math.U.See Alpha book. We completed lessons 7, 8 and 9. We spent two weeks on each lesson covering addition +2, solving for an unknown and addition +9. I feel confident that Marin understands these concepts well enough to move forward. We have flash cards for math fact memorization and Marin is confident in 64 of 100 facts. We also spent a lot of time playing Sum Swamp!

History: Finished the Travel and Transportation section of “The Usborne book of Living Long Ago.” While reading from this section of the book we spent a lot of time identifying locations on the world map and globe. We also referred to the maps when reading from scripture.

Science: Read from  ”Simple Science” and “The Berenstain Bears’ Big Book of Science and Nature” but most of our “science” this session was hands on. We visited a local honey manufacturing company to see how honey was made. We planted a flower bed in the back yard, working together as a family. And we created a Nature Notebook filled with leaves from the various trees in the yard. Marin identified each leaf and labeled it appropriately.

Music: Continued to learn the piano using “Music for Little Mozarts.” We covered identifying and locating “C” and “D” on the keyboard spending time in review of the concepts already covered.