summary school week #15

Yes, it's true, it's an actual weekly summary from me, after a month of totally slacking off, and having completely ignored week #14 altogether. Woo hoo!!!

So this week we were finally back in the swing of things, I having broken out of my January Slump (or, more accurately being forced out by children whining "Mommy, WHEN are we going to do the practice work again?!?"). I thought Zoo Boy was going to bust at the seams when I actually sang them into our new Adventure Circle on Monday morning, and then followed up with a curriculum story. As I sang our transition song from story to creative play, he turned to J and said "I don't' believe it! We haven't done this is SO LONG."

The weather has been tremendously January-ish, so our adventures took place indoors for the most part. As result, our new Snowy Adventure Circle is packed full of heavy duty movement activities, and we follow it up with sensory-rich relay races as well. We're all getting a good workout in the mornings! We also are getting in some big time speech therapy work for Zoo Boy. He lost his first tooth a few weeks ago, and now I'm in a blazing hurry to get as many of his sounds coming out the right way before the top teeth loosen up and change the way everything sounds again. So we've added more oral motor and SLT exercises (under the direction of our wonderful OT and SLP team that we visit on Tuesday afternoons) into the daily rhythm to make sure I find time to work on it with them. (J is participating as well, because he doesn't like to be left out of anything, and even more importantly, because there is a lollipop involved....)

Both boys attended a class about Chinese New Year's at the children's museum on Thursday (see photo at left), and then J took a hard science class about the heart (including getting to examine a buffalo heart first-hand) on Friday. Zoo Boy was supposed to take a similar class (with a similar buffalo heart) earlier in the day, but he got grossed out at the thought of seeing a real heart, and decided that it would probably make him gag, so he opted out. J on the other hand was pretty excited to get to handle the somewhat disgusting insides of a buffalo.

(Snakes and lanterns that the boys made during the Chinese New Year's class.)

Our curriculum stories this week were "Story of the Sun Dance" and "Rabbit and Crocodile". (We didn't manage to read a nature story this week, and it looks unlikely that we'll manage next week either, so that's something we're going to have to add back in as soon as we get a chance.)

We spent most of our story work time playing various games having to do with the 9 digits we learned about during our last math block.

For reading practice, J finished up Knight Before Dawn (one of the Magic Tree House series, by Mary Pope Osborn), and Zoo Boy started reading the first Little Bear book by Maurice Sendak.

Story Time stories for the week were In The Snow, Who's Been Here? by Lindsay Barrett George; Winter Days in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and The Tomten, by Astrid Lindgren. We also began reading "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", by Ronald Dahl, although we're only a few chapters into that at this point.