Sonlight K - Week 10

This week was pretty fun but we had to work some this weekend because a lot of things came up this week (doctor and dentist appointments, surprise trip to Disneyland, fun time with Grandma).  Here are the highlights from our week:

Language:
Munchkin worked on sentence length.  

Here he changed a short sentence (Sam ran.) into a longer sentence (Sam ran fast at the race!)

We discussed how adding descriptive terms to sentences help the reader envision the story better.  After lengthening some sentences and shortening others, Munchkin decided that when he grows up he wants to be a Dad, Author, Illustrator, Knight.  Very cute!

I also gave him a group of words and asked him to sort them into like categories. I thought I might need to help him through this one but he did it all by himself.  I was very impressed!

left to right: body parts, food, animals, men, etc.

History:
We discussed the first explorers and I Munchkin worked on this worksheet while I read.

Munchkin loved this and asked if he could have more of these!

We also discussed how explorers navigated using homemade compasses.  In order to see what it was like, we made our own homemade compass.

we confirmed our experiment by comparing our findings to my husband's phone

Meanwhile, I took this picture of what Ditto worked on one day while Munchkin and I were having school.  I thought it was so cool that he was making such a cute effort to write letters.

Because of this, and after discussing it with a very eager Ditto, I've decided to start Letter of the Week (based on books) activities this Monday.  We're all excited!

Math:
We continued to work on our double facts as well as adding one number facts and adding zero number facts.  Munchkin understands all of these concepts perfectly.

On Friday, he tried to figure out how many different ways he could make the same shape with a different pattern?  This was just the perfect amount of challenge. 

Art:
We finally finished up our Preview Lesson of Meet the Masters.  Dad worked with Munchkin on making his portfolio.   

not part of the preview- a quick lesson on color mixing

On the front is a palette with all of the artists we will be studying this year (including Munchkin's name) and he decided he wanted to paint this picture on the back (a knight on a horse with a knife and a castle in the distance)

Science:
This week we learned about "living things" and cells...
To help cement the information in Munchkin's brain, we made edible cells...

animal cell

plant cell

And watched Magic School Bus Goes Cellular. Not the best video but the boys enjoyed it.

Another day we discussed the "animal world".  I decided to take a different route with this and first discuss vertebrate vs. invertebrate.  We did the activity below to make sure he understood the difference...

Then we watched this video...twice. Great video!

Sonlight K - Week 8

Among other things, this week we worked on lots of math.

Math
Each day, Saxon Math 1 asks the child to count from 1 to 100. That would be too easy and too boring for Munchkin, so to "spice" things up, I have him use his Montessori Hundreds Board. He has the entire week to work on it and I already noticed that through this process he is beginning to understand number patterns.

He began learning his +1 addition facts. We used our hundred chart and ghost counters to understand the +1 concept...

...and also number cards to understand the +1 concept

Since it is the month of October and the week of Halloween, we used our felt pumpkin and ghost erasers to act out addition stories.

Changing the manipulatives we use definitely keeps his interest.
He continued to work on the double facts. To make things fun (and not just review flashcards) we played this Slides and Ladders game...

 He absolutely loved this game!
After playing this a few times, over multiple days, he got better and better...

The first worksheet he completed, he scored 5 out of 25, next worksheet - 15 out of 25.  (At the time I am posting this - 11/09/12 - he now regularly scores 25 out of 25 on his double facts.)

Art
We also started an Art curriculum as part of Munchkin's kindergarten curriculum.  We are using program called Meet the Masters. 

This is just the introductory lesson. He was fascinated and is very excited for his dad to complete the lesson by doing the hands-on portion next week. 

Great week!