Weekly Wrap Up; Year #4 Week 31

We had such a great week!  I'm calling this the week of board games because we sure played a LOT of games this week.  We had another minor mishap with video games and time with them has been severely limited so we've been looking for other ways to fill our time and I must say that after a week we're noticing a huge difference in behaviors and I think even the boys will agree that we've all had a great time without them.  We did so much that I found it hard to keep it all straight and kept thinking that we must have done some of this last week and I was just remembering wrong... but I wasn't!  It was a really full week of learning.



Math: We all played several games of The Clumsy Thief; we just LOVE this fun math game and it's great for working on pairs that add to 100.

Stealing piles of money in the Clumsy Thief 
Alec, Evan and I also played clock Bingo practicing telling time to the hour and half hour.   Evan is working with coins and clocks for the summer using Kumon Book of Telling Time and Kumon Book of Money.  Even though it's not yet summer he finished up his regular math book and so he's already completed 6 -8 pages in each book.



Alec just started using the Batman grade 5 book.  He was getting frustrated with all the other books so we thought we'd start back at the beginning of grade 5 and let him work his way back up to the more difficult concepts.  He's been loving the last few days and happily has completed two pages each day.

Ian and Alec worked in their Are You a Math Genius? book and all three boys completed two more pages in Multiplication games.  Ian completed his Key to Fractions book 3 and started book 4.

Both Evan and Alec each challenged my husband to a game of Battleship working on co-oridnate planes/ grids and strategy. The boys and I played a few rounds of Uno this week too; they proceeded to beat the pants off me each and every round!

Winning at Battleship (but only for a little while)
Spelling/ Sight Words: Alec played Words with Friends each morning; he's got a good 8 or 10 games going and I love that it's just as much a math game as it is a spelling game!   Evan, Alec and I played with Evan's Silly Sentence's game.  This time we tried combining two adjectives before every noun; making longer sillier sentences.  Evan and I re-read through the Dolch sight word lists seeing what words he has left to practice (NONE! He has mastered them all up through third grade) and have started practicing word families.   The older boys worked on another page in their cursive books and all three boys worked on two more pages in all of their Thinking Tree Spelling workbooks.

Reading his silly sentence 
While waiting in the car we played an alphabet animal game; we would go through the alphabet and take turns naming an animal that starts with each letter.  For example on a is for... Evan might say aardvark, while Alec would say alligator, and Ian might list African elephant and then we play our way through each letter making sure not to repeat anyone.  Some answers get quite creative and silly but usually we allow anything as long as it starts with the letter. It's been great practice for the boys on simple letter sounds and spelling as well as calling on all those wonderful science facts we know.

Geography: We played The Scrambled States of America game; one game with Alec and Evan and then one game with Alec and Ian.   Ian played Stack the States on his Kindle.  Evan and I read Ann and Liv and Cross Antarctica and Can you Survive Antartica?  He was pretty proud of himself that with all of the choices and story endings we chose he always managed to survive.

Ian read Walking in the Seasons with Kakadu learning more about Australia.

Alec watched The Hunchback of Notre Dame tor further his study of France.  Then Alec and I spent an afternoon typing up four pages of facts about France for his report and looking up facts that needed clarification on the internet.  For not having read any books on France in over a month he did a great job remembering quite a bit about it! It's so nice to have all three reports done and know that we are all set for our geography fair.

We all read Here is the African Savanna.

Socialization:  We spent a day at our friends' house.  All the kids played a variety of video games and it's so neat to see the dynamics keep changing and shifting.  They got along very well and the only issues we had were with sibling squabbles. We went to visit my grandmother, had a great time chatting with everyone at the dentist's office and the library.  We also spent time with family at my nephew's baptism.

Science: The younger boys and I looked through this post of pictures showing how our foods look when they're out in the fields/ farms before harvesting.   It was so neat and interesting! We all read You Are the First Kid on Mars and compared what we were reading to the movie The Martian that we just watched last weekend.  The boys and I also red through the facts about Mars and how we could tell that this was a science fiction book.  We've been watching the birds on Alec's feeder and on the lake (we actually saw swans this week!) and have been having a great time talking about all the wildlife around us.

We spent a day at a local science museum learning about outer space, global climate change, Leonardo Da Vinci's inventions and so much more.


 Alec discovered this book on the elements at the dentist's office and was so engrossed in reading it that they offered to let him take it home until he felt he was finished with it.  He spent the afternoon teaching me about noble gasses and the various elements he was reading about.


We've been observing nature this week too; we had a snowstorm that dropped a good 4-5 inches of snow between Sunday and Monday and we were stunned that it was so cold this week.  Living in New England you'd think we'd be used to the wacky weather but we never quite do.  But even with the awful weather we looked out our windows one day and noticed three swans swimming on the lake.  The boys were in awe.



Reading:  We read Dewey the Library Cat and started reading The 39 Clues.  We're 1/2 way through book one already and we love it.  Evan read Pandas, Kung Fu Panda Panda School and started reading his first ever chapter book!  He read one chapter in Humphrey's Really Wheely Racing Day-- and he was amazing! He read with such expression, laughing in all the right places and read with such fluency.  It did this mamma's heart some good to know that all these years of struggling are starting to finally pay off.

Ian read Treasure Hunters and finished up book two this week diving right into book three.  Alec read Kung Fu Panda Legends of Awesomeness Panda School and Po's Secret Move, Humphrey's Really Wheely Racing day, and started reading Eragon.  We watched The Chronicles of Narnia; the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian one day; comparing the books and movies.  Alec and I played three games of Harry Potter Scence it! and we're still slowly working our way through the Harry Potter movies one more time.

Life Skills:  Alec made a double batch of pancakes over the weekend for us all.  He had not used a recipe or worked with adding and reducing fractions in awhile so he needed me to be on hand to help answer questions as he went along.  He did a great job and I have to admit that he made some of the lightest fluffiest pancakes I've had in a long time!


All three boys went back to picking a night to cook dinner so Evan made shells and sauce one night this week.  I only stayed in the kitchen to keep an eye on him and help him empty the pot of boiling water when the timer went off; otherwise I had him doing it all on his own.  Ian made us all meatball grinders and Alec made french toast.  Ian also made some banana bread one day when we noticed our bananas were going bad. They all made their own breakfast and lunch each day this week; offering to help each other out.  I also "caught" Alec and Ian doing some laundry together working together to get all their clothes washed.  It's great to see how helpful and competent they are.

Cross- Curricula-- Alec, myself and my husband played a few rounds of Trivia Crack and Disney Scene it together.  We also brought Trivia Crack to my grandmother's house and played a game with her too.

Physical Education-- It snowed here Sunday and Monday and the boys spent some time shoveling, sledding and playing in the snow.  They played all sorts of Nerf sword battles and ball games in the house this week.  We all exercised together one night and when we were at the museum we were quite purposeful in only using the stairs (and boy were there a lot of them!).

Art-- We spent an afternoon wandering our library checking out the artwork that was on display for a local art show.  We try to do this a few times a year and the boys really seem to enjoy it.  We always leave excited about giving art another try ourselves.



Comments

  1. Okay, I am definitely going to have to check into some of these board games you mentioned! So fun!

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    Replies
    1. We just played another three games of Clumsy Thief!

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  2. What a fun week. We love board games!!! I can't state enough how much the enhance our learning.
    Blessings, Dawn

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think I have three or four new ones in my Amazon cart right now. We just love using games for learning.

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