Home School Happenings Week 3

This week's Family Day holiday allowed us some extra time for friends, family, and relaxation. Valentines celebrations were also in full swing this week and so were related activities. One of my favourite things about homeschool is the amount of opportunities I get to give real life lessons and teach responsibility. This can range from simply running some errands, to planning out our days and figuring out what tools we'll need along the way. This week our big task was making Valentines cookies for classmates in the forest and getting their cards ready.

My daughter knew exactly what she wanted to do to celebrate Valentines: give her friends some treats and cards. So I sat her down and asked her what exactly we needed, and created a list with some prompts. For example, what kind of cookies would you like to make? What will we need for the cookies? What will we give the cookies in? How do we know how many cookies to make? Do you know all of your friends names for the cards? When should we have everything prepared by? My daughter's five so most of the work still fell on me, but I really enjoy giving her the opportunity to really think about the details and what goes into a guardian showing up with treats on special occasions- and hopefully there's a sense of gratitude for the amount of thought and work that went into receiving Valentines from others.

Language Arts: We continued with lessons from our book Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I'm finding she's often getting mixed up with vowels now- especially with some letters saying their name due to certain rules. For example, the super E rule: when the word ends in an E, and goes consonant, vowel, consonant, letter E (ie: Cove, Kite, Gate), then it will often confuse her because she's unsure of how to pronounce the vowel sound. We have been practicing basic vowel sounds and trying to step back from the super E for now. I love that we have the flexibility to do that- notice that we went too fast and take a big step back instead of trying to push through a curriculum and then labelling a student as 'falling behind'. Homeschooling allows me to assure my child is grasping all concepts proficiently before moving on. As per usual we continued with our routines around sight words, writing, reading Bob books, and reading tons of books to her. In addition we practiced story boarding and identifying beginnings, middles, ends, characters, and settings in a story. She even created her own story (with assistance) assuring all elements of the story were present.

Math: We are working on mental math concepts. She learned that anything +1 or +2 is just the next number or couple numbers on the number line. This was a light bulb going off eureka moment for her. She began to add 1 and 2 to every number and began writing large lists of equations. In addition we worked on number families and adding with ten frames. I do include some screen time for education purposes, we love the Khan Academy app and I use it for 20 minutes to get some adding and number practice. Of course, building and engineering is always a part of our curriculum. An exciting part of this week was going on a grocery run requiring just a few items, this allowed me to sit down with her prior to going to the store and create a quick budget lesson. A bonus lesson occurred when she picked up her ruler and started walking around and measuring things.

A castle built for a princess

Science: We have been practicing a song for habitats to continue to understand requirements of a habitat and needs. In addition, we had snow! Therefore we got to do some exciting experiments, one included trying to figure out how to melt it. Baking valentines cookies and learning why specific ingredients go in them was also a part of our science learning this week.

Social Studies: We didn't do anything specific for social studies other than getting a few books from the library that discussed different types of families and traditions.

Art: We are always creating art. We painted on canvas this week, cut out and coloured tons of little hearts, made valentines for friends and family, and made some crowns (we are suddenly really into royalty and being a princess).

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