Weekly Wrap Up

My phone started playing up so hubby flashed it for me and I lost all my photos since Easter.  I’ve been able to find some I posted online in other places so grabbed them for this post.

Monday was a really great day, we ended up having one of Rocket Boy’s friends here from 8:30 till 5:30.  I thought this would mean we wouldn’t get anything completed, but I was surprised to find out that I was wrong.  His friend actually helped motivate him to do his work and sat next to him at the dining table during the day doing having turns doing Rocket Boys activities after him.

I can’t remember all we did, as the photos usually help this preggie/mummy brain remember all the details but I do remember on Monday we completed letter V from the Handwriting without tears program. I also got the Do a Dots out for Rocket Boys friend to use on a car he was making, so printed off the V Do a Dot page from the Letter of the week program for Rocket Boy.

From The Blue Book I read the story of The Lion and the Mouse by Aesop to Rocket Boy, I then gave Rocket Boy some picture cards from the story and got him to put them in the correct order based.  Rocket Boy also completed a pre writing work sheet with circles, lines and m shapes and u shapes. 

Rocket Boy and his friend did spend a lot of the day playing with Lego which is a great learning toy.  The use of their imagination when creating what they’re building, the find motor gross skills when using the bricks are so important as well as many other things they learn from Lego.

Also during the week we brought a world map.  I’ve been saving up to get a really good one, rather than one with only had some countries labelled on it.  My geography isn’t that good so I need the counties labelled so I can work out where they are before I show Rocket Boy.

We’ve been getting some post cards from around the world, these ones are from a plea I put on facebook asking friends and family to send us some.  Rocket Boy and I have been looking at the information on the actual cards as well as the stamps and he’s now learnt what a post mark is.

The 8 we’ve received so far are from:

*Chichester in West Sussex England, this took a while to find on the map as while I knew where England was Sussex or Chichester wasn’t labelled.  Luckily I have a friend from the UK and she had a better idea so after phone a friend we placed a star sticker in the general area Chichester is in. 

*3 from Australia, 2 of them from Brisbane, and 1 from the Gold Coast, these were easy to find, and very close to each other. 

*3 from Canada, 2 of them from Montreal and the other we’re not sure where in Canada. 

*And Rocket Boys favourite postcard was from The Wizarding World of Harry Potter Universal Orlando, USA. This card even has a Hogsmeade Owl Post post mark.  Orlando was rather hard to find on the map as well as it was also not labelled. A quick phone call to daddy whose extended family is American and we had the general area to place our sticker.

Later when we have time we’ll do some unit studies on each country and maybe make a display board for all the cards but I expect it will take a few more cards arriving before I can get Rocket Boy interested in this kind of project.

 

As usual Rocket Boy did his daily Reading Eggs lesson and even managed to finish Map 9.  He completed the quiz at the end and while he did pass the quiz he got 4 questions incorrect.  In the quiz summary at the end it shows which lesson the question was from so I expect Rocket Boy to repeat those lessons before moving onto the next map.

Rocket Boy also started on a new area of the Reading Eggs world this week.  This is something I kind of knew about and wanted to start with him so was very pleased he found it on his own and started it without me even asking let alone knew about.

It’s called Skills Bank and is basically spelling lessons and at the end of each lesson there is a quick quiz to see if you can spell the words.  They’ve been all very simple so far which is what you would expect in the first 3 lessons and Rocket Boy is sounding out the words as he’s typing them.

It’s also been great for teaching upper and lower case as the computer keyboard is all in upper case yet the words he’s typing is in lower case.  He has struggled a little with the letters P D and B but if I tell him which line they are in he finds them himself.

The last lesson he did get two words incorrect which I might make him redo but will see how he goes on lesson 4 first.  The two incorrect words were add (which he wrote ad) and pads (which he wrote pas).  He’s also learning about the backspace, and starting to use it to correct any typos.

 

 

We finished off the week with the letter M from Handwriting without tears .

And another lesson from The Blue Book, I read the story of the Tortoise and the Hare to him which was written in a new paper style with three columns across the page, when questioned Rocket Boy showed that he already knew they you read from one column to the next rather than across the page.  Then Rocket Boy read an early reader called Nat Ran, Ann Ran, this book is very very easy for Rocket Boy and he has read it before, but he also had to do some handwriting and colouring in which is a major thing for him and I’m very proud of the results shown below.

Over all it was a very successful week when I look at all the work completed.  It may not have felt that way during the week but we did actually cover a lot. 

Only one week until the school holidays here in New Zealand and I will let Rocket Boy have a break at the same time as his school friends.