Bigger Hearts Units 5 & 6

 

The last two weeks were busy ones for Princess L.  She is still working on her vision therapy, and we may finally had a break through.  Dr. Dean discovered a problem with her divergence ability. So we have some reading exercises with special lenses to force her to have to diverge in order to read.  We are also working on some memory exercise to stretch her visual memory skills.

Princess L just finished her first red jewel for her Sky Stormer Awana book.  She is a whiz at memorizing her verses, and is so proud to be a third year Sparkie and able to help other kids that might need it.

For history over these last two units, Princess L has been learning about Myles Standish, Squanto, William Penn and Benjamin West.  Her favorite science activity we did was an experiment using lotion and sugar to demonstrate why we need soap and warm water to effectively kill germs on our hands.  She is absolutely loving the story Baby Island!  She wants to read it first everyday, but I’m such a mean mom I usually make her wait. 

For math, she has just finished the level 2 facts and will begin the level 3 facts on Monday.  I have also decided to make Math Rider a regular part of her Wednesday morning activities instead of doing any workbook pages.  She typically finishes two pages in her book each day, and then every other day we do flash cards.  In grammar, we just finished Kiss Grammar lesson 19 in the second grade workbook. She seems to be having a bit of trouble identifying complements, so for a change I wrote all her sentences on the white board and required her to verbally ask herself the questions out loud. “What is the action?”  (Climbs) “Who climbs?” (Boy)  “Boy climbs what?”  When she said them out loud she got every single one correct.  But when she reverted back to trying to do them without saying the questions out loud she got some wrong.  I hope I convinced her that saying them out loud is the best route for her to take for now.  However, she usually completes her grammar page by herself while I’m working with Princess M, so I’m not always there to make sure she does it out loud. 

In spelling, she has just Level 2 Step 9.  She is a great speller during spelling.  Once spelling is over, she will spell the same words completely wrong once again.  I’ve heard from a few others who have kids like that, but it’s a new and frustrating problem for me.  One skill that she has improved on greatly over the past few weeks is the vocabulary box.  She looks up all three words in her dictionary and writes the definition on the page.  Then she has to choose one word to use in a sentence.  This is the part that needs work because she typically just tries to restate the definition.  It has taken some Socratic questioning to pull out of her a sentence that will work.  But her ability to look the words up in the dictionary is so much better than at the beginning of the year.  In another few weeks I think she will manage it on her own completely.

Here are a few pictures: