Week 4: Storks, whales, and more colors

MATH

 Benny had another great week!  In Singapore he had a few days of reviewing addition and subtraction from the previous book.  Then on Thursday, he started learning how to add with regrouping.  In Miquon, he been working on a mixture of adding and subtracting as well.

LANGUAGE ARTS


Benny finished reading Dark Day in the Deep Sea by Osborne to me this week.  We're still working on The Wheel on the School by DeJong as a read aloud.  In grammar, we discussed the seasons of winter and spring and the abbreviations for those months.  Copywork also included a few more state names and the beginning of Psalm 100.  He finished his first review lesson in SWO B and started lesson 7 on Friday.
HISTORY

Benny spent the beginning of the week learning about the Pilgrims in Holland and their move to Leiden using Stories of the Pilgrims by Pumphrey. 

He also learned about the 30 Years War using SOTW 3.  That particular chapter of SOTW was extremely long.  I think it would have been better to split the reading over 2 days instead.  We did complete the corresponding mapwork for the war.  Our only other hands on for the week was making an origami stork, which is pictured up in the girls' post.

SCIENCE
We had a lot of fun in science this week, although I didn't get pictures of most of it.  We're still learning about whales.  On Monday, we covered whale moves like breaching and lobtailing.  Then for fun we acted out the different moves using my bed.  There was a lot of laughter as we jumped up on the bed (breaching), went off head first and whacked the bed with our feet (lobtailing), and peeked over the bed at Henry (spyhopping) who also thought we were very funny.

We started discussing toothed whales and learned about echolocation.  We made two paper megaphones and tried bouncing sounds of the wall to see if we could hear a difference with and without the megaphones.  Lastly, we learned about dolphins and porpoises.  I haven't had a chance to buy clay yet, so we'll have to wait until next week to start adding to his ocean box.

OTHER

For geography, Benny is up to Louisiana in his state song and added North and South Dakota to his list of states that he can locate.

For art, we drew a very simple snake using these directions, which he then held against the wall to color so that is had some texture as well.

For music, we learned about and listened to a brief song featuring the viola.

HENRY

I was not very organized for Henry this week.  We reviewed his colors and read lots of books this week, mostly of his own choosing.

He's actually started spending part of his mornings looking through books on his own.  Sometimes he just looks at pictures, and other times he tells his own version of the story using the pictures.

I couldn't interest him in any crafts this week, but he did have a great time playing with Jessie on Friday when she brought out Benny's marble run.