Apples, Hieroglyphs, and Skeletons

The girls started studying apples this week. Caleigh had a stomach virus for the last couple days so we didn't get as much done as I had planned. We're focusing on "How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World" by Marjorie Priceman. We read that book each day and do an activity. We found all the places she visited to find her ingredients on our globe, talked about repetition, humor, and went over some vocabulary words from the book. In the story, the girl brings the chicken along with her instead of carrying eggs. We talked about why she would do that and the girls carried around their own eggs to see how long before they broke. Molly broke her egg in 4 minutes. Caleigh carried her egg around for 2 hours before she got tired of doing it. We read a book called "All in One Cookie", which also talks about where the ingredients come from. Then we made chocolate chip cookies together and used her unbroken egg for that. A few other books we enjoyed were: "Henry's World Tour", "3 in 1: A Picture of God", and "Ten Apples Up on Top". Caleigh even sounded out some of "Ten Apples Up on Top" by herself. We finished introducing the first 26 phonograms this week and she's doing really well remembering most of the sounds for each letter even though she was a little confused at first since she's only heard one sound for each letter before. The program we're using, Spell to Write and Read, teaches all the sounds of each letter first.

 

Colin is doing almost all of his writing in cursive now. He's still working on multiplication tables and is up to the 7s now. We studied the first writing in history. He learned about hieroglyphics and cuneiform and wrote his name in each. He made his own cuneiform tablet from clay and carved his name into it. Unfortunately, he and Caleigh were looking at it and somehow broke it before I got the picture.

He also studied the skeletal system. We read various books about the skeleton, skull, and joints. The girls seemed interested in this and listened in quite a bit. They all liked listening to the CD of Dem Bones. Chad helped Colin make a skeleton model that we hung in our school/playroom.    

 

We had gymnastics class this week. Caleigh didn't feel well enough to participate the whole time. Molly had a lot of fun and was able to walk all the way across the balance beam by herself. Colin just loves it. He wants to do it every week instead of every other week like we're doing now. I don't think the girls and I can handle that right now, but we might have to look into doing something if he doesn't lose interest.