Weekly Report: Week 34

I haven't written up a weekly report in the last little bit because we took an unscheduled break off of school.  I just wasn't feeling like doing it for a little over a week, and since we are ahead in our schedule, we didn't!  In that time, we did do about a week's worth of school days, though, so I'm going to say we finished week 34, even though it was spread over a few weeks.

Eleanor at the lake.

We went to Lake Wedington and had a picnic and played in the sand.  The girls recently watched an episode of Daniel Tiger where he played in a sandbox and they wanted to play in a sandbox too.  There are sand-filled volleyball courts at the lake, so they played there for over an hour and then we hiked a bit.

Adelaide missed out on the sandbox but had fun on the blanket with me.

Lazy mom + picnic = Lunchables

We also got to go to Little Sprouts one time.  The other week got rained out.  But the Wednesday we went was fun because they had a farmer plow a pumpkin patch that the kids are going to plant in a few weeks and we got to watch.  Here's a picture of it from Little Sprouts' Facebook page.  I'm borrowing their picture because it is pretty difficult to wrestle my three and take pictures at the same time. :)

Adelaide reached a major milestone in the last week or two.  She is officially walking!  It's about time as she is over a year old.  Right now she walks about 50% of the time and crawls the other 50%, but that percentage is going up every day.  Give her another month and she'll be a pro.

As for actual schooling subjects...

Reading:
Lydia continues to progress and is completely understanding the concept of silent "e" with long vowels.  Right now we're just going through and practicing the sentences.  She is still a very slow reader and has difficulty focusing, so it usually takes us 2 days or more to get through a lesson.

Math:
For the last several math lessons, we've been doing lessons of my own creation.  It is pretty much the same every day.  We started out spending a lot of time building "stairs" with the rods all the way to twenty.

This is a picture from earlier in the year, but we're doing the same thing.

 My hope was that by doing this over and over again, she would start to internalize 10 & 2 make 12 and 10 & 10 make twenty.  And it is working!  She has gotten much, much faster at creating the 1-20 stairs with the rods and she doesn't even need to see the number anymore.  When she is done, we "climb" the stairs and then go "down" the stairs, which helps her practice counting forwards and backwards.  Then we climb the stairs 2 at a time, which practices counting by twos.  Next week we'll climb the stairs starting in the middle, which should help her with "counting on."

I also made a playlist on YouTube of several math songs that count in different ways and we listen/ watch them regularly on our Roku.  These seem to be helping, especially with the skip counting. 

Today I took out the abacus for the first time in a while and when I explained that each row was 10, she was able to quickly tell me what the teen numbers were, and then helped me count by 2s to 20 and 10s to 100.  I'm glad we've been taking this break and think we'll keep it up for a while until she solidly understands all the concepts I'm hoping to help her with.

Handwriting:
She is zooming through HWT Kindergarten.  All the practice on the iPad with LetterSchool has really helped her take off with it.  We usually do 4 or 5 pages at a time when we practice and she does well with them and is retaining them.  We'll probably finish up the book pretty early in Kindergarten.

Spelling:
I am loving All About Spelling.  It is working brilliantly for my daughter and I am enjoying teaching it.  We are almost done with Step 5.

Memorization:
Lydia is a little more than halfway done with "Sweet and Low," which is the longest poem we've worked on (16 lines!).  She likes this one because I've sort of acted it out as we practice, so she does too.  I'll have to try to incorporate more of that into our memorization.  We also continue to review all her previous memorization on a regular basis, and she has retained everything so far.