Weeks 2-6 in Review!

It has been busy around here the past month! Since my plan to give a re-cap of each school week has failed for the last 5 weeks, you will just get the nutshell version that you probably wanted anyway! It is hard to believe that we have begun our 7th week of school. It has truly flown by and I can only imagine that in a whirlwind, our school days will be over. But, for now, I will cherish every moment of it (most of the time, anyway).

I had a momentary flash of *brilliancy* (don't worry...that doesn't happen very often!) during the 2nd week that helped me formulate a plan for the year. Since I have only purchased the first volume of Five in a Row and wanted to wait to see how it works out before investing in the other 3 volumes, I had to find a way to fill the rest of the year with unit studies. Volume one includes lessons for 19 weeks of the year, which leaves 26 weeks to do units on each letter of the alphabet!! We're doing 4 days a week and when you do the math, you get a perfect number of 180 school days (what the state of FL requires). All right, so you may not be as excited as I am, but I tell you, the idea came to me at midnight one night and I had to jump out of bed and write it down! So, I've done some looking around (using this blog for inspiration) and there are so many free unit studies out there that it will be easy for me to find units that correspond to each letter. And, I will be able to use the wonderful ideas at ABC, I Believe for the ABC weeks as well!

Oh, and one more revelation I had was that we were doing WAY too much each day. I have scaled things back a bit and I think we've found our niche.

Ok, now the good stuff. Keep in mind that along with the things listed here, we are doing daily Bible, math, and reading lessons.

WEEK 2 - FIAR book:



* We did a lot with bees this week, as part of our ABC, I Believe lesson. I found a great link where you can find clips of classical music. We listened to part of "The Flight of the Bumblebee".
* In science, we learned about clouds and made Rainy Sky Jello.

WEEK 3 - The Letter "B"
(We will go back and do "A" later)
* More bees!!!
* We started making some nice progress in reading.

WEEK 4 - FIAR book:



* Ella's favorite part of this week was this game, which reviewed the facts from the story.
* We studied Mark Shasha's illustrations in the book, then painted our own version of an ocean scene.
* Ella made a paper plate jellyfish.
* We learned the difference between moon jellyfish and the "moonjellies" from the book (actually comb jellies).

WEEK 5 - The Letter "C"
* "C" stands for "coins", "cents", "calendar", "cows" and "Costa Rica".
* We read lots of books about cows and made purple cows (yum!) for snack one day.

WEEK 6 - FIAR book:



* We learned a bit about architecture, based on Tomie de Paola's illustrations. Ella is still pointing out arches that she sees on buildings.
* We learned how rainbows are formed. We were able to make our own rainbow by allowing light to flow through a jar full of water.
* Despite my fear of clowns, we made a cute paper plate clown!

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Whew! I think I will go now and save some words for my next post! ;)