P4/5 5th 6 Weeks

We finished week 30 on Friday. The readings have seemed to be a little light lately (or maybe they’ve always been that way and we’re just getting better at sitting and listening). We’ve still been enjoying the Milly-Molly-Mandy Storybook or some Uncle Wiggily’s along with a daily nursery rhyme and some animal stories. The older girls have really enjoyed the weekly song and everyone has been doing well with the bible verse memory – at least for the week we are on it.

Science readings have been fun. Its only been one book a week, but they’ve all been great content. Nate enjoyed reading “Is the Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is?” and then we did “What’s smaller than a Pygmy Shrew” which went all the way down to quarks inside an atom nucleus, and we learned about simple machines in “How do you lift a lion?”. I know we’ll have to come back to a lot of these subjects, but I really like the simple way they were introduced. Since we’re due with the baby, I’m going to pull out a book we had in P3/4, the Flip-Flap Body book, which has a whole section on baby development to go through again with H and B.

Social Studies has consisted of a book called Then and Now which compares ‘old time’ living to present day, one room or area at a time (i.e. the beach or the bedroom). It’s lots of fun to talk about differences in the way people live. And its another Usborne book. Every one of these I have really enjoyed and I know there are a lot more in the upcoming years. Very impressed!

LA – everyone has been doing great at their readings. I think all three girls are around K to 1st grade reading level. They’ve just really done great since we started working on it every day. They also have copywork about 2 times a week and at least one creative writing a week. Last week we had a picture of a girl and a deer for a story starter and all three wrote great stories about what was happening to the characters.

Math – I admit I haven’t been working too much on math lately. We’ve just been busy. I’ve prioritized reading with the older girls over other stuff. We’ll get back to this with Hannah better when they are gone.

6 weeks left in the official core. . . I think we are going to go through it again with more emphasis on the geographical locations of the stories. Since a lot of them are folklore, we’ll just read all the stories from a particular area at once. Not sure how long this will take us (definitely not 36 weeks). But trying to hold off on starting the Kinder core until Hannah turns 5. We probably will start Ben on P3/4 around his birthday, but that is pretty light.