Our Home School Adventures: December 21

WEEKLY HIGHLIGHTS

PRESTON

Preston's favorite thing the past few weeks was finishing "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince." He loved it! He said it is his second favorite book so far. He just started "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" and is excited to finish the series. The cool part about finishing book 6 is it put him over his 50 chapter book mark. We had an agreement that he would earn a Lego set after he read 50 chapter books. We later amended it to define a chapter book as 200 pages for the larger books he was reading. He finished his "50th book" at the end of December meaning he read approximately 10,000 pages this past year, which was a HUGE accomplishment for him. He earned a Ninjago Lego set and put it together in no time at all. It came with an exclusive mini-figure "Pink Zane" that is now one of his favorites.

MARISSA

Marissa did a review for language arts. The unit reviewed the concepts of the letter "a" saying "ah" and "uh", the letters "wr" and "wh" and words with open syllable vowels. It was a fun review with games. She loved cutting out the pieces and doing all the activities to practice words she has been learning for a fun review.

CALEB

Caleb is working on reviewing reading with "I See Sam" books and "Bob" books to make sure his fluency is good and to practice easier books than the level he has learned. We have been adding in spelling words using words found in the books to practice handwriting since that is something he needs to practice more while he is learning to read. He did really well. I have to remind him how to form letters and writing is definitely a difficult skill for him still, but he figured it out and his spelling was great without help from mom.

OTHER

BUILDING AND ENGINEERING

I can safely say building and engineering got A LOT of practice the past few weeks. Presents mostly fit into this category. The kids got magnetic shapes and dominos from Grandma and Grandpa and spent lots of time building with those. Preston and Caleb got Lego sets from everyone imaginable (including each other). Let's just say, we will be building a new, bigger display shelf for all the Legos to have a spot in the toy room in the next few weeks. Caleb got an awesome Mine Craft Lego set and put it together all by himself. Preston got the Razor Crest Star Wars set (which was huge and super awesome and he put it together in a few hours - he is an incredible Lego builder). We had a great time celebrating the Christmas holiday and learning at the same time.