Plasticine and Math

Since today was Wednesday our focus was math and Canada.  I had hoped to do some art, but that simply wasn't going to happen today due to phone calls and a discussion over books read.

Our reading

we read the cinder maid.  I have to admit, I love this story much more than Cinderella.  A much more enjoyable story with a bit more 'oomph" to it.   The lad liked it to, especially all the different way the prince tried to catch Cinder Maid.

Archers and Peasants.   The infantry was mostly made up of poorly trained farmers.   Many weapons were later based on farm weapons, just more finely tuned to be dangerous, and different countries preferred different types of weapons .. some the spear, others the longbow and still others the crossbow.

Two stories out of this book today due to the lad begging for just one more. :)   the first was a story about how Athens got so many olive trees .. a fanciful story called the Horse and the Olive.

The next story was the Story of Arachne.   A proud young lady who needed to learn her real place in the world and how the "god" took pity on her.  made for interesting discussion afterwards.

Today we learned about the Porcupine.  This was fun to learn about since at night we are reading a book about Prickly Porky (a porcupine).   We learned that a porcupine doesn't automatically hit out when threatened.  First, climb a tree.  Second, turn your back and chatter, third make yourself stinky, Fourth lower head and rattle your quills, and finally... hit out with your tail.

the other was the southern black widow spider.   Did you know that they mostly like to play dead when threatened?  yeah.. I didn't either. :)

Canada

Since Canada is part of the world we are learning about earth.   Last week we learned about the different parts of the earth and I thought today I'd reinforce that a bit by making a model of the world using plasticine.

he also needed to do some writing today.  We drew a semi circle of the world with it's four main pats and then labelled then.   Since his hand was tired he then dictated to me the facts we learned about those four parts. :)

the book we are using is "the Earth".  we are on lesson two.  it is written for older students, but with some fine tuning it is working out well for us. 

Sight words

Since part of my determination this year is to assist the Lad in learning better how to read I made the decision is that every day we'll learn one or two new words. 

Today we did Come and Would.   We are using a small booklet I picked up at Costco. 

the lad is very much enjoying this book so I plan to make up my own sight word sheets to do throughout the year.  A much nicer way to learn sight words than doing route memorization.     It also gives me a natural way to do some phonics type work with him as on one of the pages the words were trying to fool him so I was helping him sound those ones out. :)

math

we did a couple more lessons out of this book today.  we learned about edges and vertices (corners) on geometric shapes.

I had a meeting this afternoon that the lad needed to come along with, so we toted along a math book and a couple of pages I had downloaded this morning. 

and yes, I know he's a grade two boy, but he's needing some backtracking right now, so this is where it's at for him.  I expect within the month he'll be feeling his normal confident math self.  :)   he did two subtraction pages out of this book.  Mind, he asked if he could change half of one of the pages into addition questions and I smiled and said sure. :)

Then he needed to a maze...this was somewhat complicated alphabet maze.  The other page was on fractions.  For someone who hadn't really looked at fractions before he was able to do this with just a couple of whispers with mommy.  :)