Weekly Wrap-Up

This is my first "wrap-up" post so bear with me. :D

Monday: Lily has gone through most of her Bran Quest Kindergarten workbook. So to make sure she was retaining information, I decided to do "workbook review" with her the entire week. We back-tracked and did everything she had done in the book by memory this week. On Monday she worked on writing the letters A through G in both upper- and lowercase. She also wrote number 1 through 12. Afterward we took some time out and wrote in her journal.


Iris worked on tracing. She did vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. When i got to curves, she wasn't feeling it and decided to play with blocks. So with the blocks we worked on creating patterns. I was trying to show her to just put it next to mine in a new line, but she wanted to continue the pattern adjacent to the line I had created. Worked either way. At least she was understanding the pattern concept. We then spent a half hour coloring in books. :D (me included)

We've been trying to introduce musical rhythm, and today was the day we did the most work. Unfortunately even though we worked with only a quater note, Iris just had fun saying "ta" and Lily retained 0. After 15 minutes of trying, I gave up for the day and moved on to basic Spanish--which thankfully they took on with no problems.

Tuesday: We had a playdate over at a friend's house today! We were there for three hours just having a good ol' time. We didn't get much done but had a lot of fun.

Iris worked some more on writing lines. Again, she refused to even TRY writing curves. Lily wrote some vocabulary from memory. I, my, you, a, the. When we got home, we did some basic Spanish.


Wednesday: We had an appointment with the Early Learning Center here in town for the Child Fair. The Child Fair is actually held for vision, hearing, dental, and speech/language screenings. They all passed with flying colors. Lily and Iris are 'ahead' by two years, each. Rose is only 6 months, so as long as she's squealy and healthy and happy, I'm not worried about her. Having three kids, we were there for at least an hour, maybe two. So again, we didn't get much done. Iris worked on body parts. Lily practiced basic adding/subtracting skills with a game of Monopoly, Jr.

Thursday: I had a whole big day planned that was put on the back burner because my husband had forgotten to print out all of the lapbook activities. (I would really like a printer that isn't taking up space as a paperweight like our current one) So instead, we hung out in our pajamas ALL DAY. I took the girls to the library where I printed out our activities (and it cost me 2.40$), played outside in the snow, and practiced some basic Chinese.


Friday: We had a visit from our "teacher" through the Learning for Life program provided by our Department of Public Health. So the girls got to play and interact with Carla by having a picnic, reading some stories, and playing with some random toys. Afterward we did our If You Give a Mouse a Cookie lapbook that I had gotten from homeschoolshare.com. It took the ENTIRE DAY. :) Iris did the shadow matching game (she got all of them right on the first try!) and the mouse paper craft (building a mouse). Lily did the 'bookwork' by writing all the circles she found in the story and telling me what we knew about mice. Both girls did the cookie-match and math mat activities. We shared some mouse-themed songs and poems and then we sat down and baked cookies. We had a LOT of fun doing this. I loved that it covered math, science, art, and language arts. Not to mention we ate some delicious cookies.


It was a crazy week. We kept getting visitors, AND it decided to snow again. Thankfully this weekend has been very nice and we've been able to leave the house without slipping on ice every five seconds. We actually left the house today in tennis shoes instead of snow boots. Tomorrow I'll be posting my ideas for the upcoming week's lessons.