BIBLE/READING:
Memory verse: If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. Proverbs 25:21
Bible stories and timeline additions for the week were Jonah, Babylonian Conquest, The Fiery Furnace, Daniel & the Lions
After I read the bible story to Caleb, we then go sit on the couch and he reads the bible story to me from his bible reader. He is to then work on summary sentences. I really can't recall whether I explained the format on here before, but at the beginning of the year he was only to write the title of the story in his bible notebook. Then later it changed to writing a summary sentence. As time has gone on he is encouraged to write several sentences. Of course, illustrating is always encouraged as well.
As the teacher I am not to correct any spelling, but just let him do his "thing." Well, that is all great in theory, but hasn't exactly gone perfectly for us. Caleb lacks confidence in his spelling. And if it's wrong, "we" have a meltdown. He loves the stories, listens to the stories, can tell them back to me and offer the main points without much issue. But he struggles with coming up with sentences and then just writing them on his own. Most of the time I ask him questions about the story and he is able to tell me some sentences that way.
So, after a bit of research and consulting amongst my counterparts, MFW moms/teachers, I've decided to go with a more Charlotte Mason approach - which is where MFW tends to go anyway. We'll continue as we are for the most part. I will let Caleb tell me his summary sentences and for the next couple of weeks I'll write them and let him do it as copy work. As certain aspects of our school day are winding up, we are going to be expected to read a bible story and write in the bible notebook every day, rather than every other day or so.
With that in mind, he'll be getting much more copy work in and in addition handwriting practice. I'm certain by the time we wrap up school he'll be able to do more of this "one his own."
With only about three books of the bible left on our list we decided to mark them all off!! Yeah!! We are still going to say them every day as Caleb doesn't have them all memorized yet. He can get big chunks of them right, but has one here and there that catches him up. I'm so proud of all that he can say by memory!
Reading concepts for the week - we touched on irregular plurals and antonyms. Deeper concepts, but Caleb did great!
With this worksheet he was to write the plural form of the singular words listed. He had a word bank at the top of the page to pull from.
And here he had a worksheet on antonyms (opposites). He had to take the words at the top of the page and match them with their opposite, then writing it on the the leaf.
We are very near the end of our workbook. In his excitement, Caleb asked to do an extra page today. I didn't tell him that it was an optional page, or he would have opted NOT to want to do it! LOL If you look at the words, you'll see why. Some of them are pretty tough. But, once he understood that the "ci" "si" "ti" and "ch" can sometimes sound like "sh" he was able to read them without much trouble. At the bottom of the page he had to read words that had an "s" in them that sounded like "zh".
I think I mentioned in last weeks post that Caleb was still mixing up his "b" and "d". It's not every single time, but if it's a word he isn't familiar with yet, he often times says the wrong letter. I'm watching him closely as I know that this is a sign of dyslexia. BUT, at the same time, over 1/2 of the other MFW mom's say their child is still mixing them up also. And they are the only letters he's stumbling over, except for "p" upon occasion. I found these cute cards from a website on-line www.blog.maketaketeach.com. He can look at them at it helps him to remember which letter goes which way. It is definitely helping!
MATH: Okay, so blogging about math can be pretty boring. I haven't posted any of his worksheets in a while because they just seemed like same old, same old stuff. I decided to throw a few on here this week so you could see that, yes, we are doing math. ;o) I'm still mixing things up a little. Sometimes he does worksheets that I've created, sometimes we pull pages from the Complete Book of Math, sometimes we're working on Singapore Math, and I also pull worksheets that apply to what we are studying from a Horizon's math book I have.
When I pull from Horizons math - it's really to refresh or go over something we've already covered somewhere else. Sometimes concepts get forgotten when not used and this is a way for me to help him remember things we've talked about. Horizons teaches in a spiral effect, I think that's what they call it. They keep spiraling through the concepts, so they don't get forgotten.
Here are the bean and money cup - bean cup is getting full for sure!
Laid them out to count them.
He even wanted to have a little fun with them today and made a "face" out of his bean sticks.
As you can see, lots of great fun this week and definitely some learning going on. We've had some really good days since the principal's talk with the student. Sometimes that just has to happen. I'm proud of Caleb for realizing how he was acting and being more conscientious of doing better. Randomly, during our school day he'll say, "Mom, we're having a really good school day today...." Just warms my heart!
In His Name,
Pam
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