Winter Promise Week 17

We finally got back into the swing of things. It was tough after such a long holiday, especially since we took an extra week so me and the hubby could take the olders back to college. It was slow going but we managed to finish the week as planned (for the most part). We began reading Mr.Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater. I love this book. In fact, I read this book to my older kids as well as my third grade classes. J began to notice that the book and the movie had some differences so we began to chart the differences in her reading notebook. We also began our unit on Polar lands with a focus on penguins. I could literally take a month to learn about penguins so condensing to a week was hard. Lucky for J, we just started back to school and I didn't want to bombard her :)

In Math, J reviewed even and odd numbers. I had her toss a unit cube onto a hundreds chart and determine if the number was even or odd.

It worked out that J finished her All About Reading Level 1 before the holidays. So, she started level 2 this week. She learned about open and closed syllables. I noticed her white board for word work was becoming too crowded so I had to invest in a larger one. The smaller one was nice for travel but it didn't give us the room she needed to complete the lessons.

She read two stories from a reading textbook that I found in a thrift store. The first story she read was Trucks by Gail Saunders-Smith. Kaleb heard the title and just had to sit in. She read the story to him several times which he loved. The second story of the week was Communities by the same author. J learned about the importance of titles in people's names as well.

We read about the Arctic and Antarctic. J completed a habitat page for both to put in her animal notebook. I love her drawings of of a polar bear, walrus, and a narwal. We discovered that polar bears don't eat penguins because they live in opposite areas of the world.

I invested some money in a penguin toob which I knew she would just love. She played with them all week. As we read about penguins, we tried to determine which type each figure was. She read an easy reader about penguins as well called This Bird Can't Fly.

I love this picture and her smile. For some word work this week, I gave her the letters of the word penguin. She then used the tiles to create as many words as she could with them.

Lastly, I made some glitter play dough for her polar region play area. Kaleb wanted in the action as well so I divided it up and let them go to town. J loved the penguin week and now we are on to polar bears. Hope you had an awesome week. See you soon.