May 13 - 17

MATH

Preston:

Preston completed four assignments in his math book this week.  He also completed his end-of-year testing for Study Island.

Marissa:

Marissa completed two assignments in her math book this week.  She also completed end-of-year testing for Study Island.

Caleb:

Caleb completed two assignments in his math book this week.  He also got really excited about complex geometric shapes that he learned about on the show Team Oomi Zoomi.  He could not stop talking about a dodecahedran.  He even pointed one out at the park (although I'm not sure it was actually a dodecahedran, but it made for interesting conversation with his older siblings.  

LANGUAGE ARTS

Preston:

Preston completed four assignments in his language arts book this week. He also started working on his creative writing journal again and completed end-of-year testing for Study Island.  

Marissa: 

Marissa completed two assignments in her language arts book this week.  She is doing a lot of extra reading practice right now.  She also completed end-of-year testing for Study Island.   

Caleb:

Caleb completed two assignments in his language arts book this week.  He also worked on writing letters and simple words.  

HISTORY (WORLD GEOGRAPHY)

Preston, Marissa & Caleb:

We took a field trip with our friends to The Treehouse Museum this week.  It was fun to see so many countries we have studied over the year.  We spent some time playing in Japan and China, the two most recent countries we have been studying.  

We also read a couple more books about China that we really liked.  

TECH (BUILDING & ENGINEERING)

Preston:

Preston made an awesome castle out of blocks this week.  He started off with the idea of making something Chinese, but ended up with a castle.  Marissa ended up helping at the end so she got in for the picture. 

Marissa:

Marissa built an amazing house out of magna-tiles with her friend this week.  It was two stories high, had a staircase and a balcony. 

Caleb:

Caleb built a mech out of building materials this week for building and engineering.  He has named it five different times so I didn't know what to call it here, but I'm going with the first name of mech.  😉

OPTIONAL (PE)

Preston:

Preston attended his karate class three times this week.  He is going to take karate for one more month until his belt test and then take a break from karate until the fall.  

Marissa:

Marissa attended her tumbling class this week.  She decided she will be joining Velocity Tumbling's competition team this year so she will attend tumbling two days a week through the summer and continue into the fall.  It's going to be busy for all of us!   

Caleb:

Caleb played outside on climbing structures at the park, on the trampoline, rode his bike and scooter and had Nerf gun wars with his friends in the neighborhood for PE this week.   

OTHER

Preston:

Preston had his piano recital this week.  It was less formal than in the past, but he still practiced to prepare for his performance.  He did an AWESOME job!  

Preston, Marissa and Caleb:

We went to the Dinosaur Park this week for a field trip.  We missed the crazy rain, but ended up there on a day that the entire world was there.  We still managed to have a great time!  Caleb was thrilled and told us the name of each dinosaur and what he knows about each one before we even read the signs.  It was so much fun! 

May 6 - 10

MATH

Preston:

Preston completed four assignments in his math book.  He is currently reviewing perimeter and learning more about finding the area of a square with simple multiplication.   

Marissa:

Marissa completed four assignments in her math book this week.  She is reviewing numbers up to 1,000 in preparation for more complex addition and subtraction problems.  She is also learning simple multiplication.

Caleb:

Caleb completed two assignments in his math book this week.  He was also given an Osmo Genius Kit for our iPad and had a lot of fun playing games using Tangrams and numbers to add to his math work this week.  

LANGUAGE ARTS

Preston:

Preston completed four assignments in his language arts book.  He worked on some editing skills, art appreciation and poetry this week.  

Marissa: 

Marissa completed two assignments in her language arts book this week.  She is still working on words with "sh," "th," and "ch."  

Caleb:

Caleb completed two assignments in his language arts book this week.  He also played the Osmo "words" game on iPad after we got it loaded and figured it out.  The words were kind of hard for him, but I'm going to find some more simple words to upload for his level.  

HISTORY (WORLD GEOGRAPHY)

Preston, Marissa & Caleb:

We attended a cinco de Mayo party at our neighbor's house for world geography this week.  They had a lot of cultural experiences available plus a bounce house, pinata and plastic sombreros.  So much fun learning about Mexico again.  

TECH (BUILDING & ENGINEERING)

Preston:

Preston built his Tinker Crate this week for building and engineering.  It was a circuit light and was really fun to put together.  We built it at the park so it is hard to see the green light, but it lights up really cool when we take it in a dark room.   

Marissa:

Marissa built her Kiwi Crate this week for building and engineering.  Hers was all about whales so she built a sweeper machine and later painted whales to attach to it.  It is AWESOME!  It actually picks up pom poms and little Legos from the floor.  The kids all had fun cleaning up using the sweeper machine this past week.   

Caleb:

Caleb finished his Koala Crate this week.  He made a butterfly puppet to go along with his study of the Rainforest.   

OPTIONAL (PE)

Preston:

Preston attended karate three times last week.  He will take his next belt test in June and hopefully be an orange belt by the fall.  

Marissa:

Marissa attended her tumbling class this week.  She is considering joining the comp team in the fall.  

Caleb:

Caleb played on his bike, jumped on the trampoline and went to the park for PE this week.  

April 29 - May 3

MATH

Preston:

Preston completed four assignments in his math book this week.  He is working on area and reviewing time and perimeter.  

Marissa:

Marissa completed four assignments in her math book this week.  She is learning about perimeter and story problems setting up double digit addition.  

Caleb:

Caleb completed two assignments in his math book this week.  He is working on writing numbers and counting and adding skills.  

LANGUAGE ARTS

Preston:

Preston completed four assignments in his language arts book this week.  His reading is becoming more and more fluent, even when reading poetry.  He is learning about homophones right now.  

Marissa: 

Marissa completed two assignments in her language arts book this week.  She also is reviewing her mini readers and completing reading assignments every day.   

Caleb:

Caleb completed two assignments in his language arts book this week.  He practiced writing the letters A and T.   

HISTORY (WORLD GEOGRAPHY)

Preston, Marissa & Caleb:

The week we learned about China.  Preston has been begging to study China all year and we finally made it happen.  Some weeks are better than others, but our class was so simple yet fun.  We read several books and the kids were following along with every word and concept.  They were really good books and there were several others the kids flipped through or we will read another day.  We also watched a YouTube video about the Great Wall of China.  It was so much fun. We made Chinese lanterns and then ate fried rice for lunch.  Caleb got excited about construction paper for the Chinese lanterns and decided to make his project into a Chinese dragon instead.  I just let the 5 year old decide what he learns as long as he's not too disruptive.  It turned out really cute!  Owen and Preston looked up the Chinese symbol for dragon and drew it on their lanterns.  It was exciting for them to learn to write something in Chinese so Preston ended up creating a story with pretend Chinese writing on our white board later in the week.  Preston clearly has an interest in China so I may end up getting some supplementary materials for him to study more on his own this summer.  

Marissa and I had a very special day this week.  We attended Shen Yun.  It was so awesome that the performance coordinated so well with the week we were studying China (I wish I could say I planned it that way, but I'm not quite that organized).  The boys watched a movie about ninjas at home while Marissa and I had a mother and daughter day to see the performance.  It was INCREDIBLE and so inspiring to watch, both from a fine arts perspective and also to learn about the history of China and its culture over the years (both good and bad).    

TECH (BUILDING & ENGINEERING)

Preston and Marissa:

Preston and Marissa built an awesome fort in the backyard for building and engineering this week.  Several friends in the neighborhood ended up helping assemble it (and play in it) when they got home from school.  The kids used lawn chairs, the trampoline, a patio table and all sorts of random supplies to create a really cool hangout space.  Unfortunately, I was busy with cooking projects and it got taken down before I realized we never took a picture of it. 

Caleb:

Caleb built a Chinese dragon out of brain flakes this week for building and engineering.  It turned out so cute! 

OPTIONAL (PE)

Preston:

Preston attended his karate class three times this week.  He will hopefully be testing for his orange belt in the middle of June so he is working really hard to learn everything that is new for yellow belts.   

Marissa:

Marissa attended her tumbling class this week.  Her ankle is doing better, but still weaker than the rest of her body so she is working, but careful as she practices.  She is trying to decide if she is going to take a class next year or if she wants to be part of the competition team, which requires more time and commitment.  

Caleb:

Caleb's karate class ended for the year, but he had a really fun week.  We took his training wheels off his bike to start working on balancing and he learned to ride a bike without training wheels in about an hour.  It was a fun surprise for both of us!