Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We took the week off to give thanks and have some family together time. We read lots of USA stories as we finish up our year of world geography and will be coming home to Hawai'i stories soon. I'm considering the work of hand making Christmas gifts to be our school projects for the coming month.

Our devotional verse for this week was Bhagavad Gita 10.35 when Krishna says "Of months I am Mārgaśīrṣa [November-December]" and Srila Prabhupada explains in the purport "The month of November-December is considered the best of all months because in India grains are collected from the fields at this time and the people become very happy." 'Tis the season to be thankful!

Long E, Sums with 5, and USA

We had family visiting and took last week off from school. This week was focused on getting back into the school groove and catching up on household chores, so I decided to do a little bit less normal.

Devotional: We picked a lot of flowers to offer and focused on Bhagavad Gita 9.26: "If one offers Me with love and devotion a leaf, a flower, fruit or water, I will accept it."

Language Arts: Govinda completed all 8 pages of ETC3 lesson 10, which was about the 'long e' sound spelled 'ee' and 'ea'. His reading and writing skills are getting more fluent and faster with this weekly practice.

Math: We did 2 very full pages from MM on sums with 5. We will probably do this again for next week's sums with 6 so that it's not too much of a workload. We usually do 4 pages per week, but these pages have a lot of problems, and we had a busy week last week, so it's working out nicely to reduce this week's work.

Geography: We read more stories about the USA. This week's favorite was Lentil, and Bee Tree is still requested often. We also read Twister On Tuesday (Magic Tree House) and Red, White, and Blue. Once all of the USA library book requests are in, we will take it easy and review our year of world geography and return to our intro to geography books.

Govardhan, Phonics Review, Missing Number, US East Coast

Devotional: We read chapters 24 and 25 of The Krishna Book in honor of Govardhan Puja this coming Saturday. This book doesn't have pictures, so I read it while they play with play dough and that is working very nicely for all of us. I love reading this book to them! They made Govardhana Hill our of play dough and held it on their little fingers. We drew Govardhan Hill on the chalkboard all together and Govinda drew it with crayons on paper. Jai Govardhan Puja!

Language Arts: We did all 8 pages of ETC4 lesson 9. It was reviewing everything learned in the first 8 lessons, plus some new digraphs with h and silent e words. He did well with it all and is getting more and more comfortable with long vowels with silent e. Handwriting is looking great these days and I'll try to get a picture of his nicely formed letters.

Math: We did Math Mammoth this week, pages 19-22. The focus was on finding the missing number. G really likes the abacus and uses it to solve all of his equations. I love how he has these 'ah ha' moments as he gets a strong foundation in addition facts up to 5. It feels so much better than just memorizing without thinking. MM is growing on us! I like how he is actually doing pre-algebra while practicing math facts. ( 2 + ? = 5).

Geography: We're reading the many library books about the east coast. I'll recall our favorites later. We're cruising through the US a little quicker now that we're almost done with our world trip and we're ready to read more Hawaii books. I plan on doing US history in the future, so I'm not going too far into US geography right now. This is just an overview and gentle introduction the the 50 states. The sad stories of war and slavery are just too much for this young age, IMO.