Weekly Wrap Up: August 20-24

We're calling this our first official week of homeschooling kindergarten and PK in the Wallace house! Really, we only added one new thing this week to the lineup of subjects we've been doing fairly consistently throughout the summer, but I needed a date to call the beginning, so the 20th it was.

First, back to school pictures!
























































We worked on Explode the Code Primer A this week, mostly with the sound of k.  All About Reading had us working on the sounds and formation of the lower case letters h, i, j, and k.  We continued to do some math lab-type activities with our cuisenaire rods.  Our favorite this week was "Purple is having a party!" (Idea from Education Unboxed)




We did a fun fine motor exercise, "rescuing" counting bears from water with tongs. My little boys need to exercise those little hand muscles! Hazel does so voluntarily, neatly coloring pages and pages in her coloring books, but the boys? Notsomuch.

AND we started Five In a Row this week!! This was our new subject and it was (for the most part) a lot of fun! We are spending two weeks on each book/unit, so this was week one of two on The Story About Ping. One of our lessons included a glance at the culture and location of China. We read a book about China and found it on our map. We did an activity counting and stamping all the ducks in Ping's family. There are a LOT of them, and some of us (mostly Mom) lost patience with it in the end. We agreed that it might be fun to have 42 cousins, though, so Uncle Nathan and Aunt Stephanie, and Uncle Matt and Aunt Sarah, get on that! Our last lesson was about fiction, what a fiction story is, and that the opener "Once upon a time..." can be a good clue that we're about to read a work of fiction.

A couple a go-along books that we enjoyed during read aloud time this week were Daisy Comes Home and How Do You Count a Dozen Ducklings? Daisy Comes Home is one that one of the kids pulled randomly from the library shelf a few months ago.  It is set in China and overlaps in several ways with Ping.  I made a note to re-check it when we got to this FIAR unit.  It's such an adorable story!  How Do You Count a Dozen Ducklings? is about a mama duck who wants to simplify keeping up with her ducklings, so she continually regroups them to make counting easier.  6 pairs, 4 groups of 3, 2 groups of 6, and so on.  Great exposure to the factors of 12 in a cute little story!




Thanks for reading about our week!  I'm going to try to post every weekend, but I make no promises of absolute consistency.