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Back to School After a Nice Long Break

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Preschool Corner

This week was the official first week back to school. Fortunately there were no groans of ‘Do we have to?’. I think everyone in this house was ready to jump back into our school routine and that made the week go even more smoothly! 

Here’s a little look at what we did to get back into the routine. No special theme this week – just normal, everyday school. Next week should be a little more ‘exciting’ on that front.

Examining and Describing Things

Kaleb School January 2013-0131 Kaleb School January 2013-0133

Science time with Nancy Larson K

In our science time, we’re using magnifying glasses and getting an up close look at things. One of the things that we’ve been talking about is how we can describe objects in different ways {hard/soft, color, flexibility, texture, etc…}. This week we pulled out the magnifying glass to look at different objects – first without the use of the glass and then with it to see what difference it made.

 

Reading the ‘th’ and ‘sh’ Sound

Kaleb School January 2013-0136

Kaleb learned the ‘sh’ sound this week in our All About Reading lesson, and after a long break from school was so excited to be reading four letter words to us!!

Fractions

Kaleb School January 2013-0067

We’re starting to talk about fractions in our math time – 1/2 and 1/4 – so we pulled out our fraction action puzzles from Guidecraft to help us out.

Kaleb School January 2013-0150 Kaleb School January 2013-0151

Although they are Christmas-themed, we used the Even Odd Number Sorting printable to work a little more on even and odd numbers and he has it down great!! I think next time we’re going to work on some higher numbers too just to make sure. We’re also practicing counting by 2’s.

Handwriting

Kaleb School January 2013-0145

We’re focusing more on the lowercase letters now in Handwriting Without Tears. Handwriting isn’t always his favorite thing to do – but he does great when he actually TRIES. We typically take two days to work in his workbook and then Kaleb has two days of using the Handwriting Without Tears app on the iPad on the same letter {but the uppercase version}.

That’s a quick sum-up of our week and the highlights. Are you back in school and working again?

More Preschool Links

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Police Officer Theme {ages 4-5}

 

Preschool Corner

 

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Comments

  1. Claire @ angelicscalliwags says

    I LOVE those wooden fraction puzzles, I’m going to have to get me some of those!! Thanks for hosting, we love linking up!

  2. Looks like a great first week back! Sammy was ready for the routine this week too! :-)

  3. Discovering Montessori says

    The look and feel of your homeschool is just inspiring! I had a few kiddos disappointed that the Christmas work was gone, good for Kaleb that he stills gets to hold on to Christmas memories while working on odd and even numbers.

    Thank you for hosting and for sharing.

  4. This was our first week back too and my kids were thrilled! When I said we had only 16 weeks left till we are going to break for our new baby, they complained, “NOOOO, we don’t want a break.” :) I don’t know if it’s just me, but I have been getting “Offline” messages when I click on your blog link from my blog lately. I haven’t had it happen to any other blog, but it’s happened repeatedly with yours in the last couple of weeks. Maybe it’s just me? Thanks for sharing your ideas. We use All About Spelling (just started) and LOVE it! Do you use All About Spelling and All About Reading? They seem quite similar.

    • There have been a few times in the last few weeks that my site has had issues. Something with my server and we are trying to figure out the issue. Usually once I know there is am issue it is back up and running in 30 minutes. It has been really frustrating.

    • I was typing from my phone earlier and didn’t finish before I hit send. We do use both AAR and AAS, although we haven’t started the spelling with Kaleb yet.

      AAS and AAR both use the same sequence and the same phonograms. Both are complete phonics programs, so they are interrelated in that way. AAS teaches words from the spelling angle, and AAR teaches words from the reading angle.

      All About Reading includes decoding skills, fluency, comprehension, vocabulary and lots and lots of reading practice. It will use letter tiles just like AAS does. AAS focuses instead on encoding skills, spelling rules and other strategies that help children become good spellers.

      For this reason, the programs are also independent of each other so students can move as quickly or as slowly as they need to with each skill. Kids generally move ahead more quickly in reading, and we don’t want to hold them back with the spelling. Marie recommends completing All About Reading Level 1 first, and then adding in the Spelling program. This way students get a solid start in reading first, and have a strong basis for spelling as well.

      Depending on how Kaleb is doing this year, we may start AAS 1 toward the end of the year, but for now we’re working on reading first! :)

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