This Two Week Review is up late because I got sick during these two weeks and we fell a couple of days behind. This was followed by Thanksgiving, decorating for Yule, and trying to catch up and not fall further behind. So, it's been a crazy 3 1/2 weeks, so here is my belated post about the first two of them:
Scooby-Doo is doing fine. He's counting good, when he feels like it. He won't say the names of the shapes or colors, but he does recognize the shapes. I think he might recognize his colors too, but I'm not sure. He's starting to sort of pick up on his letters. I caught him with his letters schoolwork book pointing to random letters while saying a different letters name. So that's progress, I guess. He's falling out of love with coloring. He's still crazy about stickers but he'd rather put them all over himself than a piece of paper. Reading has become his new favorite "subject" (for lack of a better word). He still likes his workbooks, but he'd rather curl up on the couch with me and read. I'd rather do that too! We're currently behind three days since I got sick for three days, but we should catch up soon.
Now onto Optimus Prime & Bumblebee.
We did some fun stuff for Handwriting & Reading Comprehension to take a break from our normal schedule. I think I mentioned before that they have subscriptions to Scooby-Doo and Thomas & Friends magazines. So we did the activities and stories in some issues. It was a nice break. I think I might do that again for the next Two Week period.
In Science we finished up the South America unit and moved on to Australia. In Spanish we are still learning the abc's (the Spanish version, obviously). We should be finishing that next week. I'll be glad, and I think they will be glad to. It was a pretty boring unit and the whole thing looked like some preschool abc pages.
In Geography we finished up our Landforms unit and moved onto Oceans & Continents. Also, apparently we (meaning the U.S.) can't seem to decide how many oceans our planet has. I know that technically it's just one big ocean, but when I was in grade school I learned that there are five - Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Indian, & Arctic. (Side note - it always seemed silly to me that the Pacific got a North & South but the Atlantic didn't.)
When I got to high school (and later on in college) I was told it was four oceans - Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, & Arctic. This made more sense to me (see side note above), though I was always confused why I learned differently in grade school.
So, Optimus Prime & Bumblebee's geography workbook names five oceans - Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern. I have never heard of the "Southern" Ocean before now. It is apparently the ocean around Antarctica. This makes since. The arctic has it's own ocean, why shouldn't the antarctic. Why it's not called the Antarctic Ocean confuses me but Southern makes sense too. What I'm really baffled about, though, is why we can't seem to decide how many oceans we actually have. Just decide already! It's not like new oceans are discovered daily here. We know what the damn planet looks like. Just decide. Anyway, that's the end of my rant.
Optimus Prime & Bumblebee are finally at the point where they don't want to do coloring books anymore. They have never been big on coloring books. Sometimes they bore them, sometimes they don't. When first grade rolled around I tried buying more age appropriate Coloring & Activity books instead of just straight coloring books - both to shake things up a bit and to help them learn how to do easy word search and crossword puzzles. However, they've reached the point where they are no longer interested at all. So we'll finish up this quarter the way it is written (I don't feel like rewriting the whole schedule to drop 16 days of coloring, plus I just bought them some new Santa coloring books for December) but next quarter we'll have to start doing art projects instead, I think.
They like doing a special Sight Words "class." I really just view it as an easy extension of Spelling. They are still (thankfully) in love with the Spelling class. Two pages seems to be the answer to get them to do it. Logic is a favorite, like always. We're almost done with our current Logic book. I'll be glad when we are, it's more kindergarten level than 1st grade.
In Math we've been reviewing time & money like crazy. They have the basics down, but when we try to move beyond that they start getting confused. We did all kindergarten time & money sheets for the whole two weeks. It was a nice review before we get back to regular math. Next week we start up regular math again, which we'll do for a few weeks, then we'll go back and do some more time & money.
We finished up our English book and will start a new one next week. The next English book is more of a throw back to the basics, which will be nice. I'm sick of sentence structure, capitalizing letters, periods, and question marks - and I'm sure my kids are too.
That is pretty much it for these two weeks (well, 1 1/2). Oh, I forgot. We were going to start doing some one-on-one time, but there was nothing to do it on! I figured we'd spend it going over time & money, but since we did kindergarten sheets they pretty much got everything right. There was nothing at all that they needed help on. So I guess we'll try again next week.
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