Sunday, March 28, 2010

Weekly Update: Israel and Donkeys

Geography/Literature: We colored the map and flag of Israel and read several Jewish stories and Torah/Old Testament stories. We will be celebrating Passover with our own homemade matzoh bread starting Sunday night. We just got a wheat grinder to make it fresh from wheat berries, so it will be an extra fun cooking experience. We talked with our neighbor who was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Nazareth before Israel was a state. He said that he was born in Palestine, not Israel. If American was invaded, we would not say we were born in another country, so that is why he said it that way. So, this reminded me to spend an extra week on Palestine next.

Language Arts: We started McRuffy 1st grade this week. Although it was the same format and style, it was definitely harder, requiring more thinking and handwriting. To make it a gentle transition, we split one long lesson into two days, so we did lessons 1-4 this week. The weekly spelling tests now have ten words instead of five, so that is a lot more writing. The reader was The Ham Dash, and we simply replaced the word 'ham' with 'coconut', since that's the only kind of meat we eat! He did well with it. Each story comes with a picture to color and write a short sentence at the bottom, and I was surprised how much he enjoyed this. We plan to keep them all to make a book. Looking ahead, I am very excited about this curriculum and by the end he will be reading so much. I will have to edit one character 'Super Pork' into 'Super Pig', but I don't mind.

Math: We finished McRuffy K Math this week. It's always a great feeling reaching the last page of a big workbook. It was mostly just reviewing and practicing adding and subtracting, plus a little review of coin values and greater than/less than. I was surprised that he chose to do all 15 math problems when I only required him to do 10. He really likes math and was kind of sad that we were done! We've been using legos for the math manipulative, which has made it even more fun.

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