Our Week: Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, and Finishing Astronomy

Three Rs

Math: Molly finished RightStart Level A yesterday. She was so excited and wanted to know if she was finished with math forever. Colin finished Life of Fred: Fractions. I had Caleigh stop her regular math because she's getting ready to start some new concepts that I want to wait for until after we move. She's just been doing some review work this week.

Spelling: Colin has finished the final spelling list in Spell to Write and Read. I'm going to have him review phonograms, rules, and reference pages. I'll probably quickly go through the last lists with him again next year. They do recommend doing each list twice. He and Caleigh both took diagnostic tests yesterday. His grade level was 11.2. I'm so glad we found this program when he was getting ready to start 1st grade. It's really taught us both so much and Caleigh is doing well with it now. Caleigh's mastery level was the same as the list she's on and she got a few words correct that she hasn't been taught yet. Her grade level was 3.3, which I think is great for her first year since she's getting ready to start some lists that will quickly make that go up.

History

We learned about Queen Elizabeth I. We read Good Queen Bess by Diane Stanely and Colin read Who Was Queen Elizabeth? by June Eding.
We also learned about William Shakespeare. We read Bard of Avon, A Child's Portrait of Shakespeare, Welcome to the Globe, and some of the Shakespeare Can Be Fun series.

Science

We reviewed to finish up our study of Exploring Creation with Astronomy. We read some books that we hadn't gotten to earlier. We had a themed lunch, made a rocket cake, did some mini-books for their notebooks, and made aliens from play-doh. See more about that and pictures in this post. We had a few more things we planned to do, including making a solar system to hang from our ceiling, making a model of a rocket, and making some spaceships from a book I have, but we'll save that for after we move since we'd just have to put it all back in a box anyway.

Art

We did a lesson from Artistic Pursuits, where the kids drew landscapes with oil pastels.

Everything Else

We met with Colin's First Lego League team to divide all the Lego pieces among the boys and to let the kids play. This picture is right before we took the table apart. We're going to miss getting together with them.

They had fun playing Wii

I took the kids ice skating on Tuesday.