Friday, November 30, 2012

Elementary Weekly Wrap Up: Fall Week 12

This week went well considering the many distractions that came our way. The kids continue to work hard independently and together. Take a look!!
                                                                              Art
We wrapped up our artist study of Pablo Picasso this week. You can go here to see how their masterpieces turned out.                                                                         

                                                               Language
For language works this week they did a lot of Sentence Analysis work.
 They also finished up their unit in All About Spelling learning rules to spell words with tion/sion.
                                                                             
                                                                  Math
I had a lot of fun observing them doing their math work this week. DJ still is loving writing and building numbers with the Long Bead Frame. He had a grand time making plane figure shapes with the long bead chains. This work caught him by surprise! He said " I didn't know that making shapes with the chains could be so challenging".
 
                            
Ken had fun doing Rainbow Factoring. In the photo above she found the multiples of 5, 6, 7, 8,and 9. I think her favorite work of the week was learning the divisibility rule for two using the Golden Bead Material.

 They also reviewed right/acute/obtuse angles and both of them also completed two chapters in their Life of Fred books.
                                                                        
                                                          Geography
Their Christmas Around The World unit is coming along nicely and challenging their geography skills at the right level. They had to search high and low to locate Holland:)
They have really enjoyed learning about flags too. They also visited Germany this week too.This unit was definitely our Favorite Resource this week.

                                                          Chemistry
Interest in Chemistry is still strong . Ken and DJ had fun completing a lab in learning more about Atoms. Using different temperatures of water and food coloring to determine which temperature would Atoms move fastest or slowest in.
                            
They learned about the parts of the Helium Atom and did a fun demonstration.
Meet the Electrons.
                                                     Say "Hello" to the Neutrons and Protons.
And now the Helium Atom. The Electrons were circling around the Protons and the Neutrons at different rates of speed knocking the lampshade down, but nevertheless a Helium Atom was created.      

                                                               Reading       
DJ is still into the Scientist in the Field series. Last week he finished reading The Manatee Scientist.

 This week he started reading The Frog Scientist as our read aloud.

 Ken started reading the second book in the American Girl series Rebecca.
 Ken is almost done setting up her classroom.

                                                                         Writing
All of the kids write all of the time! I found these pictures on the camera which was taken by one of them. This means that they want me to share this work on this blog:)

 They had major fun writing Newspaper Articles that I placed in our Writing Center. This fabulous free download is from a creative blog Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational.

Well this wrap ups our week and the last week of our Fall Semester.

I am linking this post to What's New hosted byVibrant Wanderings and Weekly Wrap-Ups hosted by Weird Unsocialized, Homeschoolers.                                                                                  
                                                                 
                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Kindergarten Weekly Wrap-Up: Fall Week 12





Math is becoming one of her strong interest now. She has shown mastery in preliminary activities that come before the Golden Bead Materials. Janessa is skip counting all on her own by twos and tens it is so cute.

Here is her own creation of the memory game. She absolutely loves using the Sandpaper Numbers to go around collecting objects to match the number. It is amazing to see how many miniature objects that live in our classroom. The objects she used for the number 5 came from our Living/Non Living sorting tray.

 This week Janessa has worked with the Polygon drawer of the Geometric Cabinet. Before she has only worked with it sensorialy, now we are doing three period lessons naming the shapes. Janessa became very fond of the decagon.

To reinforce color words we have been reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?
 Janessa used the cards pictured above to retell the story to the preschoolers. This work became very contagious and everyone of us has fallen in love with the book Brown Bear. All the Brown Bear work came from Shuna P's  shop at Teachers Pay Teachers.                                                                            
                                                                   
                                                             Making sentences.                                                                              
 I have tried to get Janessa excited about our Speech time, but she refuses and it is not helping when it comes to verbalizing phonetic sounds. Whenever I turn on the music to begin our Speechercise she becomes agitated. She is very much aware that her words are sometimes not clear to others. It is trickiling over to her reading and I have even tried to do this with her away from other children. Any suggestions are welcomed! 

Janessa was successful at blending words in groups of families, she enjoyed making her at family book.
                                                                    
Using the Moveable Alphabet to spell objects has been both of ours saving grace in the language department. This is her most favorite work, and she does it well.        
                                                            
We also finished reading Dinosaurs Before Dark. This was Janessa's first chapter book read aloud and she really enjoyed it. I can clearly see that her comprehension of story elements have improved, and look at that handwriting it is just awesome. We did the Write to Read together, I sounded out the word and she wrote the sounds. 

This week also marks the end of our Fall semester. Next week I will be presenting the Golden Bead 45 Layout, at and an family reading work,  a map unit and more art work requested by Janessa.