I can do all things, including HOMESCHOOL! : subtracting

This week we worked on unit 18 of HOD as well as threw in lots of Christmas fun. The kids had their Co Op Christmas party on Monday and had tons of fun. playing with their friends, making ornaments, and of course eating! We will be on break the next two weeks while Daddy is off, however I do have some fun learning and crafting ideas up my sleeve! We will be making ice cream cone Christmas trees, baking cookies, read the Christmas story from the bible, and more. One thing we did fun this week was sleep in late and then bring some McDonald's home and eat while we watched a Christmas show before school began :) My kids do not normally get to watch TV before school, so it was a real treat for them.

Unit 18: Trouble in the New Land

Verse: Since the girls both finished their AWANA books we took time each day to share our favorite bible verses. from the school year so far either from school or church.

Song: The girls practiced Jingle Bells on the piano for music this week and are so excited to play a Christmas song by themselves! I am proud of them too : )

Poem : We did not do the poem this week but we did the copy work and stuck with our Christmas theme and used red and green colored pencils.

Bible: We read the story of Jesus walking on water and how the disciples had to have faith just like the colonists had to have it during the Indian attacks.

Story time: We read five more chapters in our current mystery book and discussed loyalty and making predictions as well as asking questions before, during, and after reading. We did not not reading journals this week since we did a lot of Christmas writings. I think we may do a little reading each day of break just so they don't forget it. We will start a new mystery when we get back on track, so any suggestions for a short one would be GREAT!

Spelling: We did tons of fun activities with Christmas words. We played jingle bell words, where the first one to spell the word had to ring the jingle bell. We did rainbow words with Christmas colors, wrote a story with our words, and also drew pictures to go with each word. Here are the words we did. We reviewed proper nouns with them as well and matched up a few words that went together.

Phonics: The girls did lesson 3 in their books. Audrey is working on long vowels and Ally worked on all and alk words. Here is picture of their ETC books.

History/Geography:We met several different characters from history who survived the Indian attacks in the new colonies. We found out that Joseph and Issac from last week finally made it home safe. We met Mary and Benjamin and learned how a sparkler candle saved them from Indians and we also met a lady named Endurance who managed to hide two small toddlers in two kettle pots that saved their lives. The girls really enjoyed hearing these stories and I think that helped when the did their history review for the week because they new all of the answers! I am also proud that they remembered to write in complete sentences!

Science: Our two lessons were over how dogs use their sense of smell and what happens when water covers the scent and the other one was over how some animals use camouflage to protect themselves. Instead of the science notebook page for the butterfly camouflage activity, I had them draw a scene and hide or camouflage a butterfly.

Writing: We spent this week doing some fun Christmas writings to put into one big book. I used some pages I found on Teacher pay Teachers and we used them for handwriting. Each day we had a different prompt or question to write about and the girls had fun answering them and trying to make their answers different from each other. We used this as practice for handwriting as well since Audrey has has some trouble with neatness and letter formation lately. We also worked on a bigger writing project where we went through the writing process. The girls wrote about how to decorate a Christmas tree. Here are some photos of the steps we did.

Reading: The girls read Christmas books for their independent reading again this week, I have a ton from teaching. They also finished up First Flight in their HOD reading and did very well in their fluency and comprehension checks! I am very proud of Audrey who can now read at an end of second grade level and Ally who can read on a fourth grade level!

Math: We started on some subtracting with regrouping and though it is a tough skill we worked on it and both girls are getting it. I am hoping that we circle back to it at some point. The girls have also been working on this in the app Teach Me Second Grade, which is great! I have the app Teach Me Toddler for Ian to work on. We also worked on money and they did well on that, we have been counting money for quite a while. They had fun using real coins and making sets of money and counting it with our money stamps. The girls only have two review lessons until they finish book 1B! I am hoping to get those done by the first of next week so they don't forget it all during our break.

Art/PE/Computer/Music/Enrichment: In art the girls made sparkler candles as used in one of their history lessons. The weather was awesome this week so everyday the kids spent hours outside for their PE. They practiced Jingle Bells for music as well as sung Christmas carols. For computer time they played Christmas games online. I guess you could say our enrichment time was spent on all of our Christmas activities. One thing we did was a fun painting activity with Ian's hand print and the girls foot prints.