Learning Notes for the end of April

Here's what we're doing in school right now...

In phonics we're reading through Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons - we're on lesson 37 now and the boy is reading short, very phonetically based paragraphs.  We've also finally reached the point where we can start on early readers and we're using box 1 of the Bob Books.  TYCTRI100EL (that is not an easy acronym) also has a handwriting practice session at the end of each lesson, so we are doing letter practice.

Further to handwriting the boy has been writing a letter to his 'pen pal' and friend down south.  David took dictation for what the letter should say, and now he is carefully copying David's words in his own hand, crossing them off as he works down the sheet.

For read alouds we're enjoying The Four Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright, Every Living Thing by James Herriott, and Storyland of Stars by Mara Louise Pratt-Chadwick.  We're also reading Story of the World as a history/geography study, looking up countries and such as we go.  I never bothered to buy the activity guide that goes with the book because I know myself and I am not a 'craft person', so it seemed pointless.  Now I hear that it has other non-craft activities like map work in it and perhaps we will try it for the next SOTW volume we read.

For 'science', which is not actually a subject we're actively studying, just more of an examination through living, we are doing a lot of looking through the telescope, naming birds as they return to us in the spring, answering questions about whatever interests us (yesterday's 'I wonder' was whether coniferous trees sleep in the winter the same way as deciduous trees do, since they don't lose their needles) and looking at non-fiction books that interest us.  The latest additions to the children's non-fiction bookshelf are Exploring The Sky By Day and Exploring The Night Sky, both by Terence Dickinson.

This past week we've gone to a cooking class together, which sparked an interest in 'making dinner himself', which turned into jambalaya produced by a six year old, so that's a big interest at the moment.  The 'creating' urge doesn't stop there - we've been gifted a whole bunch of wood scraps and I've been informed we are building a feeding platform for the birds out of them, so that will involve looking up patterns or designing one with the materials we have, measuring, using tools, etc.

For math we're using MEP Year One and we're on lesson 9.  We were fine learning the greater than sign, the less than sign and the equal sign, but when it came to the greater than or equal sign and the less than or equal sign, we hit a little bump.  We've used Khan Academy as reinforcement, but we're still not completely certain about it, so we might move on and cycle back again later.

And that's school right now!  We don't have any plans to change the phonics/math/history spines we're using, but we're always on the look out for new and interesting skill reinforcement and books and activities, so undoubtedly those will continue to evolve in the weeks to come.