First Grade and Pre-K, Weeks 6&7

Weeks 6 and 7 kind of blended together.  First there was Labor Day and then we had to finish up early this week because Nana and Papa picked Peter up for their camping trip.

Math:
The big news is that Peter finished his second grade math book.  When he gets back from camping next week he will dive right into the third grade materials, starting with a unit on Roman numerals.

History:
During week 6 we learned about the Golden Age of Egypt including King Tut.  Then in week 7 we read about the Phoenicians sailing and trading around the Mediterranean sea (and stinking the place up by boiling snails to make purple dye) and the Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, forming the world's first library.

Art:
Our video art teacher "took" us to a nature preserve to visit an owl and see her big eyes, feather tufts (which aren't ears) and textured, overlapping feathers.  Then she led us through an owl art project.

Some New Resources:
We finished learning about all the parts of speech in The Sentence Family so now we are moving onto KISS Grammar.  It is interesting because it teaches grammar using real sentences found in real children's literature.  No easy, homogenized sentences...we all had to put on our thinking caps to identify the subjects and verbs of these sentences.

I finally found a Spanish resource that I'm liking.  I was tired of books that focused almost entirely on teaching kids numbers/letters/colors in isolation and never even attempted to teach them to really say anything at all in Spanish.  Getting Started with Spanish is a bit abstract for Elliot (though he is slowly picking it up through repetition), but it is perfect for Peter.  By lesson 4 it was having him translate simple phrases, and within a few weeks he will have enough utilitarian words in his vocabulary to express his own simple thoughts in Spanish.

What to Do When You Grumble Too Much.  Yeah, one of our small people is having a grumbling problem.  We are working through this book during character time hoping to curb some of that negativity.  

It seems crazy, but in just a few weeks it will be time for the last minute preparations for Audrey and our biannual unit on being gentle with a new baby.  The boys and I will go on a field trip to visit Baby Group (a support group run through the hospital that I have attended briefly after each of the boys was born).  It will give Spencer a chance to see a real baby (right now "baby" is a very abstract concept for him) and it will reinforce for the big boys just how little, fragile and helpless newborns are.  Right now Elliot's theories about new babies swing wildly - one day he tells me that Audrey will be about the size of an apple when she is born and the next day he wants to put his toys up high because he worries she might crawl into his room, open his closet door and try to play with his big boy toys.