Arrow Academy – Week in Review, 2

First of all I have to admit it was only a 4 day week for us here at Arrow Academy.  Lucy, Ty, and I have nasty sinus infections.  We spent two days this week in various doctor’s offices, and all three of us are now taking the same antibiotic.  Hopefully, we’ll get this junk knocked out soon, and, hopefully, Daddy will stay well.

I have to apologize for not having many pictures to share this week, but I still wanted to let you in on what we covered at school.

We’re still going with the pond theme and will be for about 4 more weeks.  Ty seems to be really enjoying this unit.  I made a collection of Pond Fact cards for Ty to draw from each day.  I keep them in a small bucket, and every morning during calendar time Ty gets to pull a card out for us to talk about.  Then we add the card to his pocket chart, and we review the cards from previous days.  He’s really learned quite a lot of neat facts through this little exercise. (So have I. Ha!)

All of Ty’s work has still been review.  In phonics, he’s been practicing consonant-vowel blends, and he’s just started working on his special phonics sounds again.  I know that I mentioned he’s a little slow with his reading, but Ty really has made some improvement from last year until now.  His attitude has probably contributed to this.  I can really tell he’s grown up a bit over the last few months.  And his attention span, all be it still short, has improved remarkably since first grade.

This week Ty began working on the first spelling list of the year, focusing on words that end in either –ck or –ke.  You might want to send up a little prayer for Ty regarding the subject of spelling.  He has a lot of genes to overcome in this department.

One of Ty’s strongest subjects is poetry.  He is excellent at memorization!  It usually only takes hearing a poem 4 or 5 times before he can recite most of it on his own.  Last week I introduced his first poem, “A Thank You Prayer,” and already he has it down pat.

Ty’s arithmetic lessons have been review of simple addition, counting pennies, dimes, $1, & $10, counting forward and backward by two’s, even & odd numbers, before & after numbers, telling time to the hour, and greatest and least.

And I just have to tell you what a wonderful job Ty is doing with his writing this year.  He learned his cursive alphabet in first grade, so this year he’ll just be honing his skills.  So far he’s done excellent!  Abeka incorporates a lot of penmanship practice into their curriculum – at least 4 pages of copy work a day!  I almost feel guilty about giving him all those papers to complete, but so far, Ty has not complained about it one bit.  He actually completes them in a reasonable amount of time, and his writing has been beautiful!

Now for our Tot School update.

We started with the letter L last week, but I decided to go one more week with it while we get into the swing of things.  Wow! Is Lucy catching on to this or what?!  By the end of this week she was actually tracing the letter L all by herself, saying her directions aloud, “Down. Across.”  I gave her this box of magnetic letters to play with and I spelled her name on the back of this cookie sheet for her.  Guess what!  She picked up the first letter and said, “L.”  Wahoo!!

Here she is picking all of the “lellow” letters out of the box.  We’ve still been working on the color green, but she’s been consistently calling it blue.  Oh, well.  It’ll come.

Lucy has continued to enjoy the semi-circle matching mat that I made for her. (You can see her working on it in this post.) As it turns out, she is very good at recognizing all her shapes.  I printed out a shape mat from the letter “L” printables on 1+1+1=1 website.  It has 10 shapes on it, and Lucy can point to all of them when I ask her to.  She can even tell me the names of the shapes when I point to them!  Lucy has also begun to circle the shapes that I ask her to with her crayon.  She loves to draw circles.

Here’s Lucy working on some fine motor skills with a lacing leaf.  I thought this activity might have been a little too difficult for her, but she actually did pretty well. 

Lucy did get a little frustrated with the activity at one point and said, “Mama, doot.”  I was happy to help.  Once we got the entire leaf laced up, I showed her how to pull the string out.  She thought this was fun.  Lucy loved sticking her hand under the loops and pulling them out.

The highlight of the week for us was beginning our ABC Bible Verse book.

I’m going through the book as suggested by Carissa at 1+1+1=1.  A homeschooling mom herself, she has graciously designed and shared lessons based on this book.  She calls her Bible Study time Raising Rock Stars, a name she drew from these two verses:

Philippians 2:15

so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe.

Matthew 7:34

Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

How perfect is this last verse for us?  (It’s the header for my blog, in case you were wondering.)

We began our study with the letter “L,” of course.  Each day we read the letter “L” verse and the story that went along with it.  While I was reading to them, the monkeys worked on coloring or other quiet activities.

Matthew 5:16

Let your light shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in Heaven.

Since we were talking about shining lights, I thought it might be fun to hang a string of white Christmas lights in our classroom.  The monkeys (and Mom) liked the idea so much that I’m thinking about leaving the lights in the room.

To help Ty understand what it means to shine your light, I printed out pictures of different light bulbs.  Each day Ty cut out a couple of bulbs and wrote on them ways our lights can shine.  Then he hung the bulbs on the bulletin board to review throughout the week.  A few of the ideas Ty came up with were:  prayer, helping others, telling others about Jesus, obeying God, and following the Golden Rule.  Good ideas, Ty!

Well, that about sums it up for the week.  I’ll try to take a few more pictures next week for y’all.  I just got so busy actually doing school, that I didn’t have time to stop and take picture of school.  Plus, Lucy has recently started telling me, “No pictures!”  She stops doing whatever it is that she is doing when she sees me pick up the camera, so I’ll have to get sneaky if I want to get good pictures of her.  Anyway, it’s about time I took some pictures of Ty, don’t ya think?