Weekly Wrap Up: Sept 10-14

We had three really good and one iffy day of school this week.  Not bad, right?  

In Five in a Row, we started "rowing" Mr. Gumpy's Motor Car by John Burningham.  We had fun reading this little story about a man who takes a dozen passengers with him on a ride in his car.  It rains, the car get stuck, and they have to all get out and push.  

Some of the lessons we learned from Mr. Gumpy included the definition and some examples of onomatopoeia, which the kids are all BIG fans of.  We used the book If You Were Onomatopoeia to help us understand it, and then we went back and found the onomatopoeic words in Mr. Gumpy.  

We found England on the map, where Mr. Gumpy's story takes place.  We talked about some differences between Mr. Gumpy's car and our own (the steering wheel is on the other side!).  We talked about being a helper and cooperating, since all of Mr. Gumpy's passengers tried to make excuses as to why they could not get out to push.  We compared Mr. Gumpy's unhelpful friends to the pig, cat, and goose in The Little Red Hen, an old favorite of ours, which we also re-read. 

 We also learned about rain clouds like the ones that dumped on Mr. Gumpy and his driving party. We re-read a book that Grandma gave us for Christmas, Cloudette, about a little rain cloud that learns she can make a big difference even if she can only make a little rain.  We did a science activity that simulated rain falling from a puffy cumulus cloud.  We made our "clouds" with shaving cream and dropped food colored water on them until they rained into our glass full of water.  Playing in shaving cream was certainly the highlight of the week, and I've been asked if we can "make clouds again" several times already.  Once you see the picture of the aftermath, you'll understand why I've been putting them off for a repeat. 

Charlie, watching his cloud rain 

three kids, focused on rain clouds 

forget the clouds! this is way more fun! 

aftermath. ay yi yi!

One of my favorite parts of FIAR so far has been pulling library books, or books that are already in our book stash, to read during our read-aloud time before rest time in the afternoon. These go-along books both deepen our understanding of the topics we've studied, and give us some good variety in our reading material.  In addition to Cloudette and The Little Red Hen, some of the other go-along books we enjoyed this week with Mr. Gumpy were Mr. Gumpy's Outing, a book by the same author with the same characters, Slop Goes the Soup (another onomatopoeia story) and Duck in a Truck, whose plot is very similar to Mr. Gumpy, right down to the red convertible that gets stuck in the mud.  Duck in the Truck has a super fun rhyme pattern, too.  

Last, just some pictures of hard working kids! I have to make sure and take these pictures to remind myself that moments like this DO occur in our homeschool. LOL

Charlie, working on his required coloring for the day. He's not a super big fan of hand muscle exercise. 

Hazel, the coloring queen

Jono's coloring skills are coming a long way, too!

Charlie's sequencing sheet, done with number cards so as not to frustrate the fine motor skills unnecessarily. 

Next week, we will spend two more days wrapping up Mr. Gumpy (art and another science activity--there was too much fun science in that book to stop with one!), and then we'll start our "row" of Madeline mid-week.

Thanks for reading!