4th 6 Weeks of Kinder

Benjamin has been chugging along in his kinder curriculum. We are calling this whole next year kinder still because he isn’t technically required to be in 1st grade until next fall. My ‘private school’ still only has one student, Hannah.

We are working through the Ergermeier’s Children’s Bible which is pretty thorough and not too watered down. We’re in the middle of stories about King David. Ben’s also memorizing about a verse a week, but he remembers parts of them from when Hannah did them so sometimes he starts with one and finishes with another. It’s pretty cute.

Benjamin’s ‘house’ ->
In history/social studies, we are learning about different cultures and the houses they live in, clothes they wear, fashions. . . etc. Ben had fun building a house for himself. Still reading selections from I Heard Good News Today, Usborne Children’s Encyclopedia, and Living Long Ago. We also read Twenty and Ten set in WWI era when we hit that part of our history in the encyclopedia.

For Read Alouds we finished A Grain of Rice, In Grandma’s Attic, Johnny Appleseed, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs along with weekly selections from two poetry books and James Herriot’s Treasury. We started Little House in the Big Woods. It is definitely a longer sit for him, but he still likes it by the time we are done. Hannah comes by to listen every now and then when we get to a part she remembers.

Ben’s reading continues improving. He reads lots of the signs we go by now and displays in stores. He recently sat down and read through a whole series of Clifford Early Readers, he didn’t want to stop! He finished up our I Can Read It Book 3 and has practice Word Lists once a week that match the rule we are studying in Explode the Code. He finished EtC book 2 and has moved into book 3.

Science has been interesting as we’ve done our unit on plants. We read How Flowers Grow and grew some bean plants. Benjamin was really impressed with how quickly the stems grew. We also read Caterpillars and Butterflies. I also figured out a way to motivate me to get science done more often – adding another activity for the other child. We added in typing and since I want to get typing done too, one kid does typing while the other does science and then we switch. Yay!

During this set of weeks Benjamin finished up with Horizons Math K, but it was pretty easy for him. We took a week off and went ahead and started Math 1 which we’ll work on throughout this year.

Extras
We seem to stay fairly busy with our outings. We started a monthly Chess Club which Benjamin was pretty excited about. I was impressed with all the kiddos who already knew how to play. We still have book reports once a month also. We had a few field trips including a place called Adventure Playground, going to the retirement tour of the Goodyear Blimp, and participating in a beach cleanup day.
We had two sets of friends coming to visit us and wanting to go to Knott’s Berry Farm and since we knew we weren’t going to renew our Disney passes, we went ahead and got season passes there. They also run a waterpark called Soak City during the summer so we have been going there about once a week.