Home School June Week 1

I have been very surprised with how exciting and enjoyable home school has been this first week since summer break has begun. Ella has been motivated and interested and I think it's been quite helpful that I prepared my topics and materials well ahead of time.

Our themes this week were colors and weather.  We had daily math, reading/sight words, ESOL, twice a day weather checks, and day of the week. Ella pretty much knew the days of the week already, so this was just to reinforce the concept.  Our book was Weather Words and What They Mean.  Ella enjoyed some sequential processing games on the computer, used an online beginning reader program, and watched a few videos about weather. Among other things, at the end of this week, Ella is able to read 20 sight words, name the primary colors, say hello in two new languages other than English and Armenian, and spell our last name.

Our sight word kitchen cabinet wall.
Twenty of those words came off
at the end of the week
and nine new ones went up.

Ella also got her very own library card and signed up for our library's All Star Summer Reading program where she can earn prizes for reading a certain number of books.  This week we read The Tooth Fairy Tells All and Brown Bear, Brown Bear along with the above mentioned book.  Ella's teacher sent home a very nice Summer Reading Journal, so we have been writing book reviews as well.

Emilia worked on reviewing letters, painting, standing on one foot, listening to books (Brown Bear), and inset puzzles.  Her expressive language has made leaps in the last six weeks or so and we now hear her using some adjectives as comparatives and more consistent plurals of nouns.  This week she surprised us with sentences like, "Look, two cars, a green one and a red car", "Ella's sleeping!" (screamed toward us from the van's third row where the girls reside while we're driving), and "I want cut knife. No, don't touch."

To show off our efforts, we taped everything we worked on this week to the dining room wall and took a photo to remember it.

And lest you think it's been all work around here, we've had fun, too, visiting the zoo, camping with extended family, having dinner with our cousins, and swimming at home.

Relaxing in the cuddle swing
that hangs in our front room