Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Week 4 ( Jan 26-30 )

Happy Birthday Westen!


So of course our recipe of the week this week is Birthday Cake! Westen decided he wanted chocolate and vanilla because even though chocolate is his favorite, his brother likes vanilla. Inside this yummy chocolate cake is a middle layer of vanilla. Wes helped with all the baking. His favorite part is cracking the eggs and working the blender. He also chose the bundt cake pan and the decorations. My contribution was the homemade chocolate frosting. It turned out yummy!

In academic news:

Math - We have been doing some very challenging work this week with Fractions, Improper Fractions and Mixed numbers. In addition to brushing up on his long division, Wes has mastered turning improper fractions into mixed numbers and vice versa. I'm so proud of him! Tomorrow we'll take it a little easier with multiplication and division review and then we'll move on to factors and multiples.

Language Arts - We've added a daily Q.A.C.C. or "Quack!" as we like to call it, to our routine. Q. is for question of the day, A. is for answer (Wes responds with one good sentence), C. is for comment (I reply and also make suggestions to make his sentence stronger) and the second C. is for correct (Wes rewrites his sentence based on my comments) I try to keep the Q.A.C.C. fun and relevant to his interests.

We are also going back and reviewing (I'm assuming they've been taught to him at some point) parts of speech. I think the key to eventually having strong writing skills is to really know the fundamentals of language. That might make me a little old school, but there it is. This week it's nouns and proper nouns. I've been incorporating my new activity folders (like centers). We focused on writing sentences with all three types of nouns (person, place, thing) to make good descriptive sentences. Used Draw and Write activity folder. I plan to continue with nouns through the end of this week adding plurals and possessives. Wes is a great speller so I don't need to spend to much time here.

We are also still reading our chapter book, Geronimo Stilton and The Lost Treasure of the Emerald Eye. Wes is enjoying the story. We are focusing of not taking mid sentence "vacations" and being more fluid.

We've also incorporated a Daily Language Book by the same company who makes the Daily Math. Wes responds well to the format.

So we've kicked Language Arts up a notch. I'm still easing our way back into writing. Public school made writing such a chore. We are still decompressing. We are, however, going great with our cursive lessons. We've covered A through N.

Science - Last Friday we made Milky Ways as an end of the week art project. This week we will end our planetary studies with a trip to the Science Museum. It's also his birthday treat. Next we will be studying plants. Afterward, we'll rotate back into Social Studies.

Extras - We are still studying Piano and Keyboarding and this week we will publish Vol. 4 of our newspaper, the Indie Press.

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