Over the weekend the kids went to a ‘Fancy Tea’ compliments of the local library. There were about 12 kids there, and my husband had the baby.. toddler, well whatever she is for the morning and ran a couple of errands while I was with the big kids. They got necklaces, made crafts, drank tea, had cake pops, and so on. They had a blast acting fancy and listening to Fancy Nancy stories. Nearly all the other kids had on princess costumes, but I chose to just let mine wear a nice outfit instead. I still think they were adorable.
fancy tea
Since ‘dad’ wasn’t back yet (he sold his car, so we’re down to one vehicle right now), we walked the short distance from the building this took place in to the library and the kids perused the books, we grabbed the multitude of St. Patrick’s Day books I had ordered, and they let K grab a half a dozen books right off the ‘freshly donated’ pile- they hadn’t even bar coded them yet. They have a lot of faith that we’ll return them. 🙂 At any rate, a lot of reading was done over the weekend by the 6 year old.
They also jumped in a lot of puddles, splashed in all the melting snow (hallelujah!) and in general got soggy! We’re so happy that it’s thawing, as fun as snow play is, they can wear themselves out more on regular ground. The snow continued to melt throughout the week. Toward the end of the week, the 6 year old was encouraging the 3 year old to run down the hill beside her, as she pushed herself backward down the hill sitting in a large dump truck. I can tell it’s going to be an awesome summer.
muddy puddles!
Monday I had to take the baby to her 15 month check-up so since my husband works from home Mondays (smart of me, right?) I left the big kids with him. To make up for this they did their Monday home schooling stuff on Sunday night. I think I will try and switch up how I’m going about wrapping this up because it’s getting to be quite an annoyance with formatting. Hopefully a simpler way of keeping track will be more reader friendly, too-focusing on the week, but not by day as I was before. We’re still on nutrition, but with all the St. Pat’s books, we don’t have that many nutrition books ordered—I actually discovered there was a limit to how many books I could order– ha! Several chapter books are filtering in with nutrition themes to them, but I still need to order more for different food groups. Since the holiday is important to us, we’re focusing a bit more of that this week and after the holiday we’ll pick back up with more ordered books (hopefully). Most of their worksheets are St. Pat’s themed- they love the themed sheets and since they’re learning the same thing with a heart, flower, or shamrock on the page, I don’t see how it matters, so we’ll do these until they run out and then… spring and Easter themed math and language sheets. Yeah!
Nutrition this week, we discussed wants and needs as it relates to food, our beliefs about social programs and what welfare, food stamps, wic, etc. mean as well as people getting food from food banks, and how people really truly are hungry and don’t have enough to eat. Jobs = food, and so on. We touched on ways to get food locally, to get protein without meat, foraging, and gardening, and used a world map to talk about regional foods (Mexican food in the Southwest, seafood near the ocean). We plan on getting together a donation for a new program that provides snacks and meal items (soups, mac and cheese) to put in kids backpacks at the public school to provide them food through the weekend. It’s so incredibly sad that this is a necessary program–but hunger is real, it exists and the economy has not rebounded enough to provide full time jobs for everyone who needs one. We talked about how snow days and vacation can keep some kids really hungry because there’s not enough food to go around, since parents think their kids will eat breakfast and lunch at school. The backpack program should really help those kids. Both of us as adults came from families that probably would have qualified for assistance (if it had existed then, which it really didn’t at the time), and so we feel strongly that every kid should at least not be hungry– our kids are lucky that my husband has a job and although I don’t, I choose to stay home with them, they do manage to eat 3 squares and have plenty to snack on, too.
We also touched a bit on the topics that came up in our St. Patrick’s day books, including playing some Irish dancing videos on the tablet, and a lot of discussion around emigration due to the potato famine and the fact that the likelihood is that most of our families probably got to the US to avoid starving to death due to potato blight. Cheerful? No. But it’s good for the kids to know that times aren’t always good and that food can really make a difference in your life.
Oh and Wednesday we had a ‘Drop everything and read’ or Read Everything All Day (because it spells read, and that makes more sense to me)– can you tell?
Reading Together: Typically these are themed for what we’re studying so we’re veering off for holiday fun!
Leprechauns Never Lie by Balian
Green Shamrocks by Bunting
The Luckiest Leprechaun: A Tail-Wagging Tale of Friendship by Korman
The Leprechaun Under the Bed by Bateman
Lucky O’Leprechaun in School by Dillon
Lucky O’Leprechaun Comes to America by Dillon
The Leprechaun Who Lost His Rainbow by Callahan
Jeremy Bean’s St. Patrick’s Day by Schertle
A charmed life (little mermaid book) – Disney
Lucky Tucker by McGuirk
Ten Lucky Leprechauns by Heling
St. Patrick’s Day Countdown by Yoon (board book)
S is for Shamrock An Ireland Alphabet by Bunting — this is FABULOUS with great illustrations (Matt Faulkner) and a ton, a TON of history/detail!
St. Patrick’s Day Shamrocks by Berendes – this could be a great introduction to plants, too.
6 year old
Independent Reading:
Roxie the Baking Fairy by Meadows
The Peanut Butter Gang by Siracusa
Calendar Mysteries: March Mischief by Roy
Miss Holly is Too Jolly by Gutman
Miss Suki is Kooky by Gutman
Mr. Klutz is Nuts! by Gutman
Katie Kazoo, Switcheroo I hate Rules! by Krulik
The Smurfs Movie Novelization- Where the smurf are we? by Simon Spotlight
Wedding Crasher by Geronimo Stilton
Watch your Whiskers, Stilton by Geronimo Stilton
Shipwreck on the Pirate Islands by Geronimo Stilton
Cat and Mouse in a Haunted House by Geronimo Stilton
Junie B. First Grader, Shipwrecked by Park
Invisible Stanley by Brown
Stanley, Flat Again by Brown
Keena Ford and the 2nd Grade Mix up by Thomson
Junie B. First Grader, One Man Band by Park
Science:
Inspected ice, leprechaun gold coin and a wasp under magnifying glass
Spelling:
lucky, clover, shamrock, Irish, green, gold, pot, saint, magic, rainbow and bonus words: blarney and leprechaun
Language:
Reading comprehension page- St. Pat’s day traditions with Q&A (the word search on the page ended up being too hard so we scrapped it)
St. Patrick’s day word scramble (mixed up letters in the right order)
Irish tongue twister page (write in the correct word to complete the twister)
Fun/Art:
Color by number page
Coloring page with pot of gold
Word search with St. Pat’s words
‘Fun’ page with maze, scrambled capital of Ireland, color the Irish flag
Play-doh making pizza and pancakes
Crafts, stories and etc. at the library for St. Patrick’s day (sister was too young to go)
Math:
Draw coins to match the number in the pot of gold
Write scrambled numbers listed in order from greatest to least (60’s – 49)
Clock wise 1st grade workbook from education.com 20+ pages of learning how to tell time on an analog clock.
3 year old
Inspected ice, leprechaun gold coin and food under a magnifying glass
Play-doh making pizza and pancakes
Recognizing letters X and Y
Tracing X and Y letter education.com worksheets for the week
Writing numbers 9-15 on the March calendar page
Tracing, writing and counting education.com page for 17, 18, 19, 20
Write number to match the gold in the ‘pot of gold’
Find and color 10 4-leaf clovers in a worksheet page filled with 3 leaf clovers
Rainbow coloring pages (I had a lot of these, and she loves them!)
Curved line pre-printing practice and rainbow to color
Happy St. Patrick’s Day coloring sheet
Read to her:
My ‘w’ book by Moncure
My ‘x,y,z’ book by Moncure
Care Bears Catch the Christmas Spirit by Tait
So that was our weekly wrap up, get info on how to participate here: http://www.weirdunsocializedhomeschoolers.com/weekly-wrap-up/
