Home School June Week 2

This week's themes were Months and Seasons of the Year. Ella can now name all twelve months and some things that happen in certain months.  She knows there are 12 months in a year and four weeks in a month.  She can name the four seasons and describe them.  Ella also mastered 10 more sight words, bringing the total to 30.  I love seeing her recognize these words in books when we read together.

Certain mathematical concepts are a bit of a struggle for Ella, partially due to the language of math and non-exposure to these concepts in the first six years of her life.  She counts easily and has 1 to 1 correspondence and answers the question how many with no problems.  For simple addition and subtraction, she needs manipulatives or math sliders to solve the problems.  However, in situations where she doesn't think she's doing math, she sometimes surprises us.  For example, she asked us one night this week who would be eating the pizza for dinner and I said, "Well, there's six of us, but Rex and Emilia cannot eat this pizza."  And Ella quickly responded, "Then four of us will eat it (Craig, my mom, Ella and me)."  Along the same lines, she does better with math word problems than with strictly numbers ones.

Our work minus the book reports and journal entries

This week Ella and Emilia also earned their first prizes in the local library's Super Summer Reader program.  Each read four books (having someone read them to you is allowed) and in return both girls received a new book and a coupon for a meal at a local restaurant.  Of course, with the rainy weather we've had here lately, there's been a lot of reading: Spring Is Here, My Daddy Loves Me Because, Four Seasons Make a Year, Eloise Takes A Lesson, Water is Water, Moo Baa La La La, How Things Grow, I See Things Differently, The Big Book of Feelings, Home Sweet Home, Rosie's Family - An Adoption Story (Ella learned the words birth parents, birth mother, and birth father).  Ella especially enjoyed the Eloise book because Eloise is six just like her and they share some personality traits.  Ella went so far as asking me to participate in acting out some of the scenes from the book which had her laughing hysterically.  We'll certainly try to get more Eloise books and I told Ella if she works really hard for the next six weeks, we will watch the Eloise movie at the end of the summer break.

And lest you think it's been all work around here, the kids had some fun, too, joining another adoptive family at Pogoplay, learning how to bake a yeast cake from Oma, playing in the rain, and finally swimming in our pool again when the sun returned.

A baking lesson with Oma