Week 1 LG: Family Trees and Dragons

Benny's 4th Grade
MATH

Benny started Singapore 4A this week learning about place value to the ten thousands place, rounding numbers, and estimating answers. In challenging word problems, he began working on the review problems at the end of the third book.

LOGIC

He's been describing shapes in Building Thinking Skills 2, completed his first MindBenders puzzles from the A3 book, and played a couple of Rush Hour games as well for logic.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Benny started R&S 4 with a review of sentences and practice identifying simple predicates. He completed the 31st lesson in SWO D and began the next lesson on Friday.  For copywork, he wrote the first 3 verses of Genesis, and I made up random sentences for dictation.  In CW, we analyzed the fable "The Goose with the Golden Egg".

For Bible, this year he is reading Vos' The Child's Story Bible and narrating the selection orally.  I'm having him read aloud to me twice a week.  This week, he read his CW fable and a poem that was in his grammar book.  Independently, he read Henry Huggins by Cleary and narrated orally.  We also began our first read aloud, The Story of the Treasure Seekers: Complete and Unabridged (Puffin Classics) by Nesbit.

LATIN

Benny began his first year of Latin using Latin for Children level A. He learned 10 words and the present tense conjugation of amo.

HISTORY

Benny and I read the introductory chapter of The Story of the World Volume 1 Revised Edition this week covering history and archaeology.  We filled out the family tree on the first page of his history notebook and placed his narrations in the booklets on the top of the second page.  The booklet on the bottom right comes from a free online lapbook that I found and contains pictures of different items that a historian or archaeologist might study.

Independently he read Archaeologists Dig for Clues by Duke and The Magic School Bus Shows And Tells: A Book About Archaeology by Cole. Since our sandbox was soaking wet, we skipped our dig and instead picked different items from around Benny's room and talked about what an archaeologist might learn from them. Next we read the first four Veritas Press history cards. Benny drew pictures of the different days of creation and wrote the titles under the other pictures in his notebook.

SCIENCE

Benny wanted to study animals this year for science, so we are using Exploring Creation with Zoology 3: Land Animals of the Sixth Day (Young Explorer Series) by Fulbright.  This week, we read the first chapter covering creation, predator/prey relationships, zoologists, and other jobs with animals.  We sorted some animals cards into the Bible categories of wild animals, livestock, and creeping creatures and then again into predator and prey stacks with a few animals that could fall into either category.

HENRY'S KINDERGARTEN

Henry and I picked back up with his lessons in Phonics Pathways by Hiskes covering the pages for the letters R, L, and F this week. 

We began our first chapter book:  Three Tales of My Father's Dragon by Gannett. We also enjoyed several dragon picture books including: Behold...the Dragons! by Gibbons; The Book of Beasts by Nesbit; and The Egg, The Great Dragon Rescue, The Dragon Snatcher, and The Dragon and the Gruesome Twosome by Robertson.

For math this week, we reviewed counting to 100 by 1s, 5s, and 10s using our abacus and played a number matching game from last year.  We matched shapes in Building Thinking Skills Primary and completed a few mazes in Visual Perceptual Skill Building 1 by Critical Thinking.

We also did a couple of Kumon cutting pages.

Next week we'll add some other Kumon books and some art as well as a little more variety to our picture books.