Afterschool Blog Hop

I did so well with blogging two weeks ago and this past week was silent. Sorry about that! It's been a very busy week for us and I just haven't had time to write. I don't know about you, but I find I need at least an hour to focus on writing most blog posts, and I just haven't had that kind of time free lately. Anyway, here's what we've been up to this week.

Pre-K
M's theme this week was the tundra. So she learned some geography, and was able to locate the tundra on our globe. She also learned about some of the animals that live in the tundra. In addition to that, they are also working on money (pennies, nickles and dimes) and skip counting. So far she's doing well with money but struggling a bit with the skip counting.

At home, we've been working on getting her to write her full name (first and last) with the right capitalization. It's hard since our last name is nine letters long! But she's written it a few times. I think we need to get some paper with the lines for writing because she writes her lowercase letters as tall as the capitals! In addition to that, we have been trying to get her to learn her address. That's proving difficult but I figure we are starting early so hopefully she'll know it by the time she goes to kindergarten in August!

2nd Grade
C had a very short week of school. Monday was a holiday and then he was home sick on Thursday and Friday. There wasn't a lot of afterschooling going on, aside from making and reading a short book on Martin Luther King, Jr., on Monday. Like last week, the fun thing at school was science-related. He had to make a whirligig at home and then experiment with what would happen when he held it in certain places. So we took it outside, held it over the heat vent, blew on it ourselves and then he ran through the house holding it so it flew behind him. That's when it twirled the most. It was a fun bit of homework that M enjoyed too.

The other interesting thing that happened this week was that I went in to C's class for the first time to work with a group of six kids on Math Stars, which are two-sided worksheets filled with advanced math problems. It was very interesting to hear the variety of ways the kids solved the problems. Here's an example of one of the problems.

The kids solved it in all sorts of ways, including by adding 6+6=12+6=18+6=24+6=30 (so there were 5 pots of 6 flowers) and multiplication (6x5=30) and division (32/6=5 with a remainder of 2 ~ yes, a 2nd grader told me this) and by drawing 32 little lines then circling each set of 6. I think it's going to be a great program to be involved with.

Mom
I have had a crazy week. Work has been so busy I have hardly had a moment to myself. When I went to the school on Tuesday, I literally ran out the door after hanging up from one conference call and then got on another shortly after returning home. I feel bad because when C was home sick, I wasn't able to spend much time taking care of him. I was too busy working. And with several conference calls each day, he ended up on the computer for much more time than I would have liked. With all that said, the project is really interesting and I'm glad I'm doing it. I just hope I'll occasionally have some downtime at some point!

The Afterschool Blog Hop is hosted by:
Just Playin’ Around
Little Wonders’ Days
Mama Smiles
Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns
The Educators’ Spin On It
What Do We Do All Day?

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