Russia, Long A, Adding With 0

Our magic carpet ride continued to Russia this week.

Geography: We colored the map and flag of Russia and checked out books about this biggest country in the world.

Literature: We read several Russian and Ukrainian folk tales and stories. I was surprised how much they liked The Nutcracker. The Mitten is a great story that we own that was revisited. Rechenka's Eggs and Clever Katya were some other favorites. More stories just came in for next week, too.

Language Arts: This week we did McRuffy LA lessons 11-15. The focus was reviewing the 'long a' sound, spelled with 'silent e' and 'ay'. The reader, Ruff and The Ape, was fun and amusing as usual. The ten spelling words made him have to think about whether to use a silent e or y, but he got them all down by the end of the week. Handwriting has greatly improved since our extra time focused on it, and he forms all of his letters correctly now. Everyday he is writing a sentence that reinforces the phonics lessons. The sight word 'are' was introduced and then some grammar practice followed, reinforcing 'is' for singular and 'are' for plural. Each story ends with five questions to read and answer about the reader and then a sentence hunt to fill in the missing word and find the page number it is on. After five times now, he's got the research abilities to do the sentence hunts without my help.

Math: We did CLE 1 lessons 10-15. All of the new facts were adding with 0, and 0 is very popular here because it is such a funny number because it 'adds nothing!' We practiced counting by 10s and with dimes, acknowledged the differences between circles and squares, and found the numbers before and after a number. We started doing place value with tens and ones and also acknowledged 'twin' math facts that have the same numbers in different order. The Just For Fun activities at the end of the lessons were connect the dots, and he really liked it. The flash cards are working well and he's memorizing his math facts well. These lessons will have up to 20 addition problems reviewing the math facts, and he's not having any problems with it being too much, which is a relief for me because it looks like a lot, but it's the same simple facts again and again.