Moving right along

I give up! There's no point tracking our weekly progress now. We're in the midst of spring break, and then we're in the last 2 months of school. I'm just going to throw in a smattering of things we've covered over the past few weeks with the photos and videos I managed to take….

A little fun building in Minecraft. It goes without saying that this was a hit.

up close on Great Wall of China

great wall of china and pyramid from above

great wall of china and a pyramid in mine craft

passport and dragon for China study

practicing Chinese calligraphy

Egyptian pharaoh - he's mad because his workers created
such a small door for his pyramid he's not going to be able to fit :)

practicing endings on the wipe board

And our poetry unit project, memorizing and reciting a poem. This was fun to watch because as we practiced it, he kept it straight and just focused on knowing the words. Once the camera was rolling, he played with it more and made it his own!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BArKcmPH5tg

I'm planning on mixing things up a bit after we get back to work next week. We've managed to cover all the material for 3rd grade for Social Studies and Math. He tested at a 4.4 grade level in a recent math test we took through Mobymax. He was extremely pleased about that, and it definitely boosted his confidence! We also took one for English, and he scored at a 3.5 grade level. I'm not so convinced of the effectiveness of this test in evaluating his level, since certain key aspects of ELA were left out (like reading comprehension) and you could click on an audio of each question so he didn't have to do any reading. It was good for him to take a test that wasn't created by me though, and have a sense of accomplishment. I have a few other assessment tools I may use towards the end of the school year to get him used to other testing platforms and questioning styles (this one was a non-timed computer test).

I'm going to try and get him reading and writing more, and thinking about what he's reading. His reading comprehension continues to be great, while his fluency is slowly progressing.  He's got the basics of a paragraph down, but I'd love to get him to work on expanding more on what he writes and putting those awesome ideas he has in his head down on paper.

For the last few months, we'll keep on with Barton, an essential part to our day that he doesn't love but we do it first we get it done right off the bat! We'll follow this up with some math review. We'll focus a bit on multiplication and division practice, combined with some online activities. This will hopefully reinforce what we've covered and let us expand a little on topics that he seems to enjoy (like doing problems in his head!)

The tricky part will be the middle of our day…I want to take a unit study for each week based on a social studies topic that's interesting to us…I'll give some choice in this since we finished the main curriculum - (ie. great buildings of the world, WWII, US geography…) and then include aspects of ELA in that topic… This would've been a great thing to do throughout the year, but I wanted to get far enough along in Barton so that he had more tools for reading.

He really loved reading Story of the World, and I love how it was more of a narrative of historical events than just reading facts. It had quite a bit of biblical stories in it, which took some getting used to. But interestingly enough, he loved the bible stories most of all! Another goal is to find some fun stories from other religions…

Science will end our day, and I'm hoping to focus on the scientific method and experiments. I've been trying to do this all along, but it just hasn't come to fruition the way I've wanted it to. I'm going to try and use our experiment notebook to write out the parts of the scientific method for each activity with a goal of reinforcing the fun of experimenting and failure in any path to success! :)

Suppose I need to get planning now since it's Saturday already!!….

Week 22 - Exploding bags and Mardi Gras (through Week 24!!)

I don't have any pictures from our last week which ended with a sick Livi and a visit from Nanee and we've ventured into Mardi Gras territory, but last week before the festivities began we tried our exploding bags and finally had success! 

 And it begins….

Week 21 - quick catchup

Shark dissection at the Audubon zoo (which honestly had the mom's more interested than the kids…)

all a little unsure about the experience…and the smell

Science we talked about weather, including a refresher on the water cycle, clouds and then storms. Great non-fiction book in our collection talking about different storms. And of course a magic school bus! We tried to make a tornado in a jar, but it was one of our less exciting experiments.

shaving cream and dye to show clouds and run formation

 More Ancient Egypt fun, including a hieroglyphic letter to Grandad, a cuneiform golden tablet, and falcon canonic jar, and a mine craft pyramid!

math and english are moving right along with decimals and non-fiction texts

Week 20

Trying to play catch up before Mardi Gras kicks in and I can't keep track of anything!

Science - land changes
volcanes, earthquakes…lots of cool video footage out there on youtube!

Social studies - introduced Ancient Egypt, pharaohs, and of course mummies!

math - measurement

ELA - barton, plus non fiction text structures

We ended the week at Sector 6, a new trampoline park with his friend Wyatt. Oscar loved it (he's racing up the trampoline in the distance)

Week 19 - Socialization

I've come to a very happy place in terms of socialization for Oscar. Between his after school activities and his friendships with a few kids (one from the neighborhood and one from school last year) we've pretty much got it covered. But there are few things we do in our homeschool day that have been great. One is the PE Plus class we started last term, that continues this term. Instead of Spanish, they've changed it to building things with wood, which Oscar really likes and seems to blend better with the day. Cooking and PE are the same, and it's a lovely 3 hour chunk of time that I can run out and do errands and just wander without having anyone attached ;) The other class we've started again is the homeschool program through the Audubon zoo. We made it to 3 sessions last term, and will do a few sessions this term as well. Last week was at the zoo, and while the class wasn't my favorite (it was chemistry in nature but I thought it would be more related to how animals use chemistry specifically) Oscar had fun reconnecting with a friend and meeting some not-so furry friends.

Kelly the hedgehog

In English, we worked on our first non-fiction text structure - descriptive. (We'll be putting all the different types of non-fiction into a chart in my effort to put more of our work in writing.) We read a passage about Magellan (Readworks.org is my new favorite resource for reading passages) and a book about Snowflake Bentley to help learn about this type of text. Barton continues as well, and we're adding a new spelling rule every week now which is great to see it all coming together. Oscar was very excited to teach Dada the "floss" rule the other night!

We started measurement in math and it made me realize how freaking confusing standard measurement is!! Someone please tell me why we aren't on the metric system? At any rate, we're going to continue with that next week as we sort through what in the world an ounce is. Can you tell I'm not happy about this unit?

In science we've moved on to landforms, and we made a flip book with different landforms, and a diorama showing them all.

In social studies, we've covered almost the whole year curriculum from the VA schools, so we're backtracking a little and covering material he missed last year (including Ancient Egypt and Ancient China). To do this in a way that flows, I bought the History of the World as a guide and so far it's really great. Short little reading passages combine with hands on activities. Some are good, and others I pull from pinterest projects. We did some cave paintings on paper and started Oscar's own timeline. Next week Ancient Egypt begins!! I'm looking forward to mummifying a barbie, and making canonic jars :)

Week 18 - Back into the swing of things

We hit the ground running last week, combining some review with our Barton work. We reviewed some sight words and parts of speech with our popsicle stick nouns,verbs, and adjectives. We also went over the features of non-fiction text, with Oscar seemed really comfortable with.

We also started working on some friendly letters, and Oscar wrote his first letter to Gigi, content inspired by our furry friend Leo.

One goal I have is to have the kids work on an art project every monday afternoon, when we don't have any other activity going on. This week we did watercolor pictures for our Thank You cards from Christmas!

In math, I've started adding a new topic each week, while reserving one day for app work (which he loves) and one day for multiplication/division facts. This seems to keep both of us interested in what we're covering. This week our new topic was lines and angles. He also took his second math quiz from the books we've been working on and got 100%! He even read the word problem all by himself. :)

In science we talked about renewable and non-renewable resources, pulling from my favorite pinterest resources… Oscar had fun trying to find toothpicks (coal) and straws (wind) that I scattered throughout the house to represent both types of resources. Here he is categorizing renewable and non-renewable energy after the lesson.

To end the unit, we watched a Reading Rainbow video on recycling and talked about the importance of reducing our energy use. A good way to get rid of the cardboard I've been hoarding for projects was to create some toys/ramps out of cardboard and then recycle them!

We also did a mini review of the scientific method with some experiments that I've had filed away that just looked fun. Oil and water is always a neat one, with the added fun of adding salt to create a lava-lamp-type effect!

watching how dye spreads differently on different surfaces

We spent another week talking about Famous Americans talking about Abraham Lincoln, Sacajawea, and Lewis and Clark. The highlight for him was definitely watching the lego rendition of Lincoln's life, complete with his lego head being blown off…I had to explain the video makers took a little creative license, but it definitely made his assassination memorable! My favorite was reading about Lewis' dog Seaman, the Newfoundland that accompanied them on their exploration west. Oscar decided there is no way he would've wanted to be an explorer. It was just too hard :)

Week 17 - Recovery

We were all sickies this week, as the flu cycled through the house. I finally rallied on Friday and pulled out some science experiment from my Pinterest arsenal. The kids loved playing with oobleck, and had fun learning about the science behind heat rising with flaming tea bags.

the orange streak at the top of the pic is the tea bag!