summary school week #18

Sorry for being late with this -- we've been preoccupied with a new foot of snow and trying to get in all the last-storm-of-the-season fun that goes with it.

This was the last week of our second Math Block. We've been concentrating on number qualities up until now, next time we revisit math, we'll be starting work on the four processes (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division). This week we worked with odd and even, which you can read all about here. At the end of the week, we took the 100 chart we made at the beginning of this block and colored in green for even and red for odd. The kids had no problem deciding which row got which color.


In addition to our usual weekly stuff, we spent the afternoon at the children's museum on Thursday, where Zoo Boy took a class about winter and J took a class about pancakes. Each boy also participated in a museum program while the other was in class. In this photo, Zoo Boy is petting the bearded dragon, which he learned about in the gallery program he attended.


J attended a gallery program about making mosaic artwork. Here's his creation from that program.

Reading practice this week included some more Little Bear stories for Zoo Boy and Pirates Past Noon, the 4th in the Magic Tree House series, for J. I also started reading Misty of Chinconteague by Marguerite Henry to them as our next chapter book. (I can highly recommend this book -- the story is fun, the language is both rich and flavored with regional dialect, and it's piqued my kids' interest in learning about the islands off the mid-Atlantic coast.)


J continued his pursuit of mosaics at home with a magnetic mosaic set we have. I was sort of blown away by this picture, I originally assumed that he'd copied the pattern from the insert that came with the set. But after examining the inserts several times and not seeing it, I finally asked him where he got the picture from, and he said "I made it up in my head". Huh.


Gym class featured indoor soccer this week. The kids all voted on what to do next week, and they decided to play dodge ball again. Oh goody, guess we didn't miss that completely after all....


Other features of the week included a new lamb being born, working with "Sugaring Time" as our nature story, and attending a birthday party where they got to learn carnival tricks. It was an eventful week!