Homeschool Review Week 1

The first week of homeschool went great!  What a smart girl I have.

She has a couple of workbooks that she works in each day.  They have basic grammar, writing, and reading skills.  We are flying through the pages.  It's good as it is giving me an idea of what she knows and what we can work on.  She catches most concepts quickly.  The ones that give her trouble, we will work on those until she gets it.

In math, we've just been doing math worksheets - addition and subtraction.  I've showed her how to add double digit numbers.  One kind of addition graph we tried was very difficult for her.  She never really did catch on.  We'll try that again next week.  We've discussed ordinal numbers and skip counting.

We've started the Cuisenaire Rod lessons.  The first few weeks are just getting acquainted with the rods.  All the kids have really enjoyed this.  They have built 3D shapes and 2D pictures.  She created a robot with the rods and called it Jene (pronounced Jean).  She wrote a long, elaborate story about Jene. 

For science, we started with something fun - the 5 senses!  She spent most of the lessons blindfolded as I held various things under her nose to smell, placed foods and spices on her tongue to taste, put objects in her hands to feel, and made noises with different objects for her to hear.  Today the blindfold was put on her and I told her to go wash her hands in the bathroom.  She had to feel her way there, find the sink, the soap and the towel.  She walked into the living room and sat down in the rocking chair and then she joined me on a walk to the mailbox.  There was a lot of laughing and a lot of bumps into things.

She started learning some cursive writing.  It is something she has been attempting to do for several months.  This week she learned i, t, l and e.  They are the four easiest letters to learn.  She writes them beautifully!  Then I have her write words like, "lite", "ellie", "till" and "elite".  She is doing extremely well. 

We made a trip to the library, went on a number of walks, and made several trips to the new park that just opened in our neighborhood.  It's been a very busy week.

I don't have next week's lessons planned out yet.  I'll work on those later....