Language Arts

Little Bug has really made great strides with her reading over the last month! I am amazed at her ability to now read 4, 5 and 6 letter words. I give all credit to All About Reading Level 1. I must confess I have looked ahead at the lessons at times and freaked out thinking, This is getting way too hard! but the program flows in a way that it all just comes together and suddenly your kid goes from reading just CVC words to being able to read grass and shrub. It’s amazing. Little Bug still hasn’t gotten to the point of desiring to pick up a book and try to read, but I am so excited to see the progress she is making with AAR. I still firmly believe this needs to be done on Little Bug’s time – and not me pushing her to read before she is developmentally ready to take off. She is getting there and, little by little, we will keep tackling her phonics until she is a proficient reader. We do AAR 15-20 minutes four times a week.

The picture on the far right is Little Bug holding all the Word Cards she has mastered. One day I decided to show her all the words she knows. She was pretty impressed with the stack of cards and asked if she could read them ALL. After I picked myself up off the floor from fainting at this request, Little Bug proceeded to read every single word! She went through the entire stack in one sitting. As always, I go with the flow of Little Bug and, this day, she was extremely motived to read so read we did!

We don’t do any formal writing curriculum (as suggested by Classical Conversations), but I printed this activity for her to do when Sweet Pea was having her Pumpkin week in preschool. Little Bug had to cut the words out and make them into a sentence. Then she drew a picture and copied the sentence onto the lines provided. Copywork will be in Little Bug’s future, so I figured this was a good activity for her to do!

Sweet Pea has finished the first of the three parts of All About Reading Pre-Level! She has completed the capital letters and now we will be moving on to the lowercase letters before moving to letter sounds! I printed a few activities for Sweet Pea from the Pumpkin pack. We enjoyed reading some of our favorite pumpkin books shown in the picture below. I have noticed an improvement in Sweet Pea’s fine motor skills! One day she wrote the entire alphabet in our Dry Erase Capital Letters book! We do structured Preschool learning for about 30 minutes four times a week.

Math

Little Bug is making good progress on memorizing her addition math facts. She has learned the Doubles Plus One facts. We’ve played a lot of games this month to review math facts. Addition Game is an easy to make, fun to play basic addition math fact review game. You roll two dice, add the numbers together and cover the answer on the board. First to cover all their numbers wins! I found some cute candy corn Doubles fact puzzles.

The last week of October, we learned about Odd and Even numbers in preparation of learning the Add 2 to an Even Number facts! The first day of that week, we spent our entire math time learning about odd and even numbers through various activities and a book called Even Steven and Odd Todd. I asked Little Bug to count by 2’s (easy for her thanks to CC!) and I wrote the numbers on the board. Then, she went back and wrote the missing numbers and we had our evens and odds! We played two games. Even Steven and Odd Todd was easy to make. She rolled a die. If the number was odd, Odd Todd moved one space. If the number was even, Even Steven moved one space. Whoever got to the red circle first on the game board won. Odd Todd won twice and Even Steven once. Then we played a game with our 100 Chart. Little Bug pulled out a number tile. If the number was an even number she covered it with a blue tile. If it was an odd number, she covered it with a red tile. Little Bug had had some exposure to even and odd numbers in Horizons K Math, but after this, I really feel like she has the concept down! We do a 20-30 minute math lesson four times a week.

Sweet Pea also did some activities from the Pumpkin pack and Candy Corn pack (free printables). We worked on shapes this month by playing The Measured Mom’s Shape Game. Sweet Pea also did some of The Measured Mom’s Number worksheets. We’ve also been working on coloring in the lines. The top left picture, Sweet Pea is concentrating hard on coloring in the lines! Sweet Pea does 1-3 math activities weekly.

School on the Road

We took our annual family trip to the mountains this month! We took the week off from school, but I did bring a few things for the girls to do incase we had any time to kill! Turns out a couple mornings it worked out perfect for me to take the girls out while my parents stayed back with Sarge while he napped! (I am already looking forward to going back to the mountains in the summer because we won’t have a child that needs a morning nap by then!!!) Little Bug worked on her math facts, Sweet Pea worked on writing her letters and then most of our time was spent reading our chapter books. We were reading The Never Girls Collection #2. Both girls love these books. We read books 5, 6 and 7 while in the mountains!

Classical Conversations

It is hard to believe that here at the end of October we have completed 10 weeks of CC! We have two weeks left in November and then we will be on break until the New Year when we will go back and complete 12 more weeks. I know my girls are going miss CC during the 6 week break so I am already thinking of fun ways we can review and possibly even dig a little deeper into some of the Memory Work while on break.

Week 8’s science experiment was, in Little Bug’s words, “The most disgusting thing I have ever done!” The girls got to disect owl pellets. I personally found it facinating! The kids dug through the owl pellet and found bones and bone pieces. Using a chart, they were able to identify what animal their owl had likely eaten! Ours had eaten a rodent of some kind. Did you know owls eat their prey whole and then approximately 20 hours later, they regurgitate an “owl pellet”. The owl pellet is full of fur (from the animal eaten) and the animal’s bones. Facinating!

Farm

We missed our CC Field Trip this month due to being in the mountains, but we went on our own little field trip to a Farm! I wrote a post about going here. I was thrilled to see my friend Meg and to get to talk with her while our children played and entertained themselves for HOURS together on the farm. We got a good education about life on a hay/cattle farm! Pictures on the left: walking through the cow pasture. Little Bug is trying to pet a cow in the bottom left picture! The cow ran away from her. Top right picture: Harvested hay in the barn. Bottom right picture: walking through the hay field. We were there just over 24 hours and had a fabulous time!

Mountains

Little Bug got to take a pottery class with her Uncle while we were in the mountains! She made a coffee mug for her Daddy, although her Daddy ended up making more of it than she did! Matilda said playing and exploring the clay is right on target for a 6 year old’s development and it isn’t until about age 10 that children can learn pottery skills and put them to use. Little Bug enjoyed playing with the clay and Matilda even sent home a huge block of it with her. We gave it to my brother because we will stick with Play Doh for now! Clay is messy, messy! She came home covered in it!

We enjoyed our week in the mountains. The leaves were gorgeous!

Creative Play

I stopped packing a bunch of toys on trips. The girls pack 3 things in their backpacks to entertain themselves on the road, but once we are there, I want them playing creatively! Little Bug and Gramps made this “fairy house” from a mailbox package and the girls played with it all week.

Pumpkin Patch

While in the mountains, we went to a Pumpkin Patch for our annual Pumpkin patch pictures. We have done this since Little Bug was a baby! These pictures through the years are some of my favorite family pictures. I love to see how our family has grown!

And now it is November! The Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays will be here before we know it!

- Elaine