School Recap: September

It's a little late since we were at the beach all last week (more on that later), but here's what we were up to last month.

We did a lot of graphing. One of our projects was to eat 10 apples (guess what we had a lot of for snack!) and record the number of seeds in each apple. We then arranged the numbers in order and made a graph showing the results.

*I even learned something: The amount of seeds in an apple correlates to the health of the tree!

Other math highlights for the month included learning about wholes and halves. We put it into practice using the speed slice game on the wii. They had to shout out "half" or "not half" as they cut their objects, and then we moved on to some real-life slicing in the kitchen (using pizza cutters - much safer than giving Kerri a knife!). We also did some "guesstimating" activities with pennies.

The girls now know what it takes to make a complete sentence (and one of their new favorite words is "fragment"), and they also know what nouns and verbs are. We done some "classifying" work where they ask the right questions to discover the subject/verb in a sentence, but we've also made things a little more fun by going on noun hunts, making "noun soup," and acting out the verbs in some funny stories.

We read Flat Stanley and incorporated that into our study of the United States. We mailed out Flat Stanleys to friends all over America and are eagerly waiting for them to all return with info from the states they visited! In the meantime, they're becoming familiar with the names and locations of all 50 states. 

We've enjoyed watching and learning about our ants. They're much farther along now than in this picture. In fact, I've been debating whether it would be cruel or helpful to them to dump more sand in their home just to give them something to do.

We've expanded our Spanish from numbers to numbers and colors. We've played lots of games, together and online. Their favorite was probably "backwards bingo" where I called out a color in Spanish and they got to remove (eat) the m&m of that color and see who cleared a row first. We also pulled out the "edible paint" again since they enjoyed it so much last month. This time we painted marshmallows with it.  

Emma Lee's cursive is coming along great. Here are her first two cursive sentences! She's also made a 100% on every math test and every spelling test! She loves test time - at least for now!

As much fun as we've had, we've also learned that everything can't be all fun and games all the time. After a rough day, where I didn't exhibit as much patience as I should have and the girls both ended up crying and frustrated at different points in the day, we came to the point where we just stopped and talked about what was going on. I promised to do my best to make learning as fun for them as I can, and the girls promised to do their best with good attitudes when it comes time for the "boring" things. I also rearranged how we go about the day, and now we get those "boring" things over with at the beginning, while everyone has a lot more patience! Things have gotten a lot better since our "deal." I actually haven't heard one complaint from them since - I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will last!