Thursday, February 28, 2013

Poetry

I wanted to share (read: brag!) what D wrote today!  She even illustrated her poem!  Now, I might be partial but I think it turned out pretty amazing for a six year old!  Completely self-initiated and self-motivated, too.



Tuesday, February 26, 2013

A day of science experiments

Today has been a day of science experiments. We infected some agar Petri dishes with our own bacteria and sowed some Lima beans! We have wait for the results though!



Friday, February 22, 2013

Weekly Wrap-up

This is one really long post with many pictures of our work week since we stayed home mostly except for a few classes.

In Language we basically worked through FLL and WWE.  We are almost done with Level 2 of FLL, 10 more lessons to go.  I am right now contemplating between buying Level 3 or just use the Montessori Sequence.  So far FLL has helped us tremendously in keeping up with constant Language work with zero preparation on my part, but we have always done Montessori first and used FLL as only re-inforcement.  Level 3 introduces diagramming work and the reviews on amazon mention a lot of repetition.  It is not a very expensive buy, so may be I will have it on hand just in case!



The constructive triangles made an appearance this week after a long time.  D worked with the Triangle and Large Hexagon boxes.




We also used the Geo-board to make Triangles that were acute, obtuse and right angled.  I really need to get moving on the geometry presentations as she seems very interested in this.


D is done with the subtraction memorization sequence now and she worked with the last chart in the set.


So, this week I looked through Karen Tyler's materials and made this little booklet that has some subtraction equations with missing parts.  She worked through the 8 sets in a couple of days.



We were reviewing the strategies to add 8 and 9 (RightStart) one day and D wanted to see how fast she could do them!


We also introduced the DOT board addition this week.  She worked on it almost everyday and now does not need to be reminded to carry-over every time she crosses-out a 10!


We also worked with the subtraction snake game one day, though I don't have a picture of it.

I printed off the Six Kingdom information cards from MPS and presented it to her.  I was worried that we jumped into the study of fungi without doing the sequence in the Zoology albums, so I gave her this lesson.  She liked it, did it once and then went right back to continuing to research about fungi!


Here she is reading a booklet from MPS on the parts of a mushroom.


Here is her drawing of the mushroom.  She dictated and I wrote what she wanted me to write about mushrooms in her journal.


In SOTW this week she worked on the pending maps and coloring pages.


Once again, here are a couple of pieces of art by D.  This time I caught her in action and took pictures while she was at it!




This week was also my Wedding Anniversary.  D wanted to do something special and asked for a piece of big cardboard from our project pile.  She made a background and did a magic show for us!  We loved it!
The backdrop, painted.

Her setup before the show!
I don't have pictures of the actual show, but she did three tricks for us and also a little dance performance!  

While all this work was going on, my little one did her own trays was walking in and out of the school room all week!  Here are just a couple of shots from her week!







Monday, February 18, 2013

Weekly Wrap-up

This week was a very short week, given that we had my birthday, valentines day, a field trip, a party and co-op.  We still managed to keep up with some schooling.  We continued with FLL and that led to this Montessori work on Animals and their sounds.



Something new in Math this week.  We worked on the subtraction snake game.



D then decided to give me some very hard(!) addition problems.  She had to verify my answers, so we got her practice done anyway!


She worked on some logic type puzzles on her miniLuk.


D used glitter glue to paint some rocks for our Valentine Exchange with local friends.


We made some Mushroom Spore prints as part of our fungi study.


We made some Solid Gold Nubian Bracelets with Toilet paper roll and gold paint.



Friday, February 15, 2013

Georgia O'Keeffe 3D Flower


After our discussion on Georgia O'Keeffe, I searched around  ideas to do a project based on her art and found this.  I knew D would love it.  I also found a free video tutorial on this project at Home Art Studio.  We watched the video and got to work.  We used just regular paper and oil pastels, scissors and a glue stick.  Since I did the project together with D, I don't have pictures of the work in action.  Anyways, enjoy the finished product!

D decided to make her flower real colorful and used different colors

Mine is a copy of the work in the tutorial

Here is M's 3D Art.  We always include her in whatever we do and M colored her paper and decided to cut and glue and create this piece! Now it hangs proudly with our artwork!

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Fraction Equivalences Chart - FREE Download


If you've been reading our weekly wrap-up posts, you will see that we are working on Fraction Equivalences.


While I hand-wrote our Fraction Problem tickets, I created a Fraction Chart for self-checking.  The idea is from here.  Similar to hers I've created this with the Montessori Bead Colors.  You can download it here.

As it is with all over the blog world, these downloads are for your personal use only and not for distribution or sale.  If you choose to share anything you've seen in this blog, please link back to here.  Thank you for your understanding!

Monday, February 11, 2013

Weekly wrap-up

Here are some shots from our work this week.  In Language, we continued working on diagramming sentences.  We still continued with FLL and WWE.  Presently in FLL we are working on memorizing the list of pre-positions.  I find that this helps her a ton with diagramming sentences.  I like that we used Montessori to understand the different parts of speech and while that helps a lot when analyzing what words belong to what part of speech, memorizing helping verbs and preposition lists make the work go a lot faster!


In Math, D wanted to work on the Singapore Math Textbook.  While we are done with the 1A and 1B levels, D started the 2A one this week.  We don't do the workbooks.  D likes to switch things around and loves to work on some workbook style Math at times.  Given where she is at the Montessori Sequence, I suspect that most of the work in the 2A and 2B levels should be fairly easy to her.  It is in a different format and using pictures to solve problems challenges her differently.  One of the exercises was to order 2 digit numbers and D had difficulty doing those pages and I had to remind her to get the golden beads to see which ones where greater.  I realized that she clearly understood place value, but when confronted with a few numbers and ordering, she could not easily do that.  So as a way to practice I placed the number cards from the Place Value Cards from MPS in a basket and told her how to play this new game.  She basically picks up 4 cards at a time from the pile and orders them.  Since these are cards and easy to move around, she could easily arrange them.  This has given her a lot of confidence in figuring out the right order to the problems in the Singapore Math Textbook.


She continued to work on Fraction Equivalences.


Here she is figuring out what strategies she can use to find the answers without the use of manipulatives.  She has learnt a few strategies in RightStart and is practicing what she can use to solve these.  We do around 5 problems 2-3 days a week.


She got into measuring things with a tape measure she found. We briefly discussed measurement and standard vs non-standard measurements.


I had purchased a Brock Magiscope on eBay for $20!  We've been having fun looking at various things around the house.  I used my phone to get pictures of the items we were seeing.  This week I ordered the 10x wide eyepiece off eBay again!


Sea Salt Crystals 
Sugar Crystals
Here is a new work for M, that she repeats several times a day!  Placing Marbles on Golf Tees!


To finish this post off, here is a Master piece by D again!  She made a collage of her own drawings!