Language arts ~ week 1

Now we moved our attention back to 

learning our letters.  

This time we are focusing on lower case.

Matthew has been going crazy to learn lowercase

letters.  He sees words in print and all around and wants

to try to sound them out, but without the familiarity to 

the lowercase it is really hard.  

Finally, we got to learn about them!

We talked about letters and matched 

up the big and little letters.  

I wrote them out on big sheets of 

paper.  We looked at them a lot to 

become familiar. 

We read two fairy tales this week and

did them in a two day rhythm.  

First, I told the story

The next day we recounted it and drew about it.

We wrote a short summarizing sentence.

We used our alphabet properly for practice.

Sample work

We practiced and practiced our lower case 

all week.

We also changed up some of our time with movement.

I attempted to teach the children the beginnings of juggling.

They had a lot of fun with this!!


We also took advantage of our unseasonably warmer
weather and climbed trees. 

The big highlight of the week was my Mr. Wesley
turned 5 years old!!
He wanted to skate for his birthday so we celebrated
with a hockey party!

Happy big 5

until next week
~blessings

Math ~ week 3

 This week of math was a re-cap 

on everything we learned so far.

Then, the addition of our last 

process...

division 

 First, we discussed it through our 

squirrel story.

We worked out new concepts with our 

nuts.  Drew pictures...

6 divided by 2 = 3

Finally, we worked out problems.

Matthew has a lot of fun with this.

He really loves the challenge of 

figuring out the math problems.

By the end of the week he could do all the 

processes.  I am so proud of his progress:)

We used the jewels to work through the 

problems.  He likes to figure it out in his 

head the best though.

Santa brought Matthew a chess game and 

this week we brought that out.  

Now he is unstoppable!!!

He can already beat the pants off me and his father.

The queen is his favorite piece on the board, but

Here is the real queen of the house

Next week we return to 

language arts.

until then...

~blessings

Math ~ week 2

We continued on with our introduction

to the processes this week.  Although we also celebrated our 

Christmas over the weekend.  It made it a little more 

interesting ( aka busy).  We can not take a holiday break 

this year due to the late January bambino.

So, we are plowing through our curriculum 

as much as possible until I am out of commission.

We started out the week by recapping our 

squirrel story of Addition and Subtraction.

They really love practicing with 

plus and minus.

Then, I complicated things this week and brought in

Multiplication.

This was way to abstract for Wesley.

Matthew did catch on fairly quickly

and he really seemed to enjoy it.

Tom was home this week too so

he was able to help me with all this math.

Which I welcomed immensley.

We let all this new information rest for the 

weekend and started our Christmas celebration 

early.  Our family stayed away from home enjoying 

some R and R at a hotel attached to a waterpark and

of course a skating rink!

Boys

Hot Cocoa

Dad on skates too!

After all this we went into our traditional 

celebration.  It was a wonderful way to 

kick off our holiday.  We had so much fun.

I hope everyone else had a great holiday too.

until next week

~blessings

Math ~ week 1

This week we began introduction to the 

four processes.

Addition

Subtraction

Multiplication

and 

Division

I followed our chosen curriculum

and this first week we focused on

Addition and Subtraction.

These were introduced through a story.

The story was of a squirrel family and nuts.

To clearly illustrate we brought out nuts.

We added with nuts and took away with nuts.

We drew pictures of our story and our math.

The steps were...

first with the physical nuts 

then with a drawn representation

then with our number symbol.

They caught on fairly quickly and we had fun practicing 

our nut problems.

We also enjoyed our time outside this week.

The lake behind our house finally has enough ice 

and we were invited to a friends pond!

The boys love to skate.

Merry Christmas everyone!

until next week

~Blessings

Nature

I have to say I like working in these blocks.

The children work really hard on something and 

then we can switch gears.  It really is a breathe in 

breathe out kind of schedule.  

This week was a nature week.

nature is a big breathe out for me.

More of a sigh :)

We sort of relax this week.

We made cookies

And proceeded to eat them ALL!

We took walks and made Christmas pine cones.

We made a new nature table

AND...

We celebrated a wedding and
our Christmas with part of our family too.

Nature was a good week:)

until next week

~Blessings

L.A. ~week 2

Now that all the letters have been 

introduced we worked on sentences.

We would write out a sentence on one page

with an accompanying illustration on the other.

Then, we practiced writing out our alliterative 

verses.  I worked on sight recognition of some words

( The, of, and...)

One day was devoted to seeing Santa

we went with my dad to the mall of America

we saw Santa, went to Lego land, and underwater world.

We had lunch at the Rain forest cafe and Tillie was terrified of

all the mechanical animals!

We celebrated two Saints this week as well.

December 6th is St Nicholas day.

I read lots of stories of Nicholas and the children 

woke to find coins in their boots!

We also celebrated Santa lucia.

Along with my Mother we brought the children

to a concert put on by the Swedish institute.

It was really nice and a gentle introduction to 

Swedish tradition.  

Matthew worked on his recorder more 

this week and he learned his first song!

Next week is a nature week.

We need this to organize before 

Christmas!  

until next week

~blessings

L.A. Week 1

We went back to our language arts 

lessons now.  We continued with our story

of the prince and his quest to be king.

We had a lot of recapping.  I had Matthew

remember and retell the story.  Then I introduced the last of our 

letters. 

X  Y  Z

Were the three shepards

C (Cat)
and
N (Needle)

The story came to an end and we worked on these new letters.


We did more recorder practice.
He learned new notes and we worked on songs
and reading music.

He was able to attend Chinese again after a little
Thanksgiving break.  Now they have been learning
different body parts, like eyes, nose and mouth.
What really gets a laugh around here is the Chinese
word for hair is pronounced like toefat. 

He still is going crazy with hockey.
We just joined another league and he still plays
every week with his uncle Chad.



We went out and found our Christmas tree this week too.

Here are the highlights...

Hot cider

Santa

Authentic Teepee

I have also tried to get us back in the spirit of the
season and we started reading our advent book again.
But the tree should really help:)

Next week we do another week of
language arts.


He's not going to be able to do this much longer!

good night!

until next week

~blessings