Friday, January 15, 2010

Weekly Wrap-Up: The Scarecrow Edition

It's probably not very encouraging to new or potential homeschool parents for me to start 90% of my Weekly Wrap-Up posts with "I'm so glad it's Friday," so I won't do that this week.  How about "I'm glad tomorrow is Saturday" instead?  ;-)  It's not that our weeks are so horrible or anything.  It's just that I love having a day free from any schedule or routine.  Tell me it's not just me.

We actually had a pretty good week, school-wise, this week.  We managed to finish up some projects that we started last week.  I believe I mentioned that we're going back through Nutrition 101.  For some crazy reason, I was thinking we could do a chapter a week -- well, I guess, technically, we could have gone on to the second chapter since we'd still be on the unit on the brain, but I think we needed some time to adjust to a full schedule again, after Christmas break.  So, this week we finished up our brain hats:


 

And, did salt dough models of the brain (an idea I got from Samantha):


 

 

We had a lot of laughs over random comments such as:

"You need to finish your brains today."

"I've got to bake your brains before we paint them"

"Oh, no!  I forgot to take the brains out of the oven!"  (Thankfully, they didn't get too overcooked!)

The whole week had me singing my favorite song from the Wizard of Oz (which used to be my cell phone ring tone, btw.  It describes me some days.)




I've been toying with the idea of alternating between Nutrition 101 and Christian Kids Explore Chemistry for science.  Nutrition 101 isn't really a complete science program, but I think we can round it out nicely with some library books and projects.  I really want to do Nutrition 101, but I know that trying to do it and chemistry each day would be way too much for us.  Did you see the free download from CurrClick this week, though?  It's a periodic table of elements card kit from Teacher Book Bag.  It's got me totally excited about getting back to chemistry soon.

Speaking of things that have me excited, did you see Jimmie's post about her daughter's Poetic Devices Reference Mini-Book?  The link she shared to the classroom posters page is fantastic!  I'm going to be working on setting up some reference sets on rings for us.

Those are the things that have me excited this week.  That and the fact that I lost another 2 lbs.  That puts me at a grand total of 17.6 lbs. lost since Thanksgiving.  Yay!

We took Thursday as a catch-up day for Josh and Megan.  They both had several math corrections that hadn't been done and it was clear that there were some concepts that needed some one-on-one time with Mom.  I think we got most of it cleared up for Josh, but it's clear to me that Megan really needs to spend some time on her basic facts.  She still doesn't answer addition facts as automatically as I'd like to see and she's very far from proficient at multiplication -- not a good thing when Horizons is introducing division.

We've tried several practice drills, including Math Shark and several on-line sites that I've reviewed, but they still don't seem to be sticking.  We may just have to resort to boring old flashcards.  Before we go that route, though, I'd love to hear any suggestions that you have may have.

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Posted by Kris at 4:36 PM
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16 comments:

  1. Love your projects this week. I am determined that one week I will write my own wrap-up and link in. I had skipped my currclick nl this week and missed the freebie. Thanks for that. We're doing CKE chem, too.
    For multiplication I used Memorize in Minutes with mine who struggles with math facts. It helped. It's kinda goofy and it took more than minutes. But it helped.
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  2. We love brain stuff! I like the salt dough brains. I really need to make some dough for my kids next week, they would have fun making some pyramids I think.
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  3. Thanks for the great links. I actually downloaded the periodic table. So Cool.

    Glad I found your blog. Look forward to reading more.
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  4. I hear you on the basic facts. It seems no matter how much time we spend on them (and no matter how many new products we get that help us do so), they still come and go.

    We are actually enjoying the two we have right now, FactsFirst and MathScore. I like the charts in FF and the timed drills in MS. But, we need to keep using them for a while yet before they will all be where I want them.

    The brain hats turned out well, but I love the models even more. Great stuff!
    ~Erin
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  5. I love how in the last brain pic the Toncils are extended. I was able to show Hailey what her's looked like and talk to her about why that's a problem. Thank you.
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  6. LOL! I love all the brain comments. Too funny! Salt dough is so versatile.
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  8. Oh my goodness! That brain is awesome! I'm going to have to try this!
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  9. I think we all have occasional weeks where we're glad it's Friday. And, I'm sure it gets more so as the kids schooling gets more involved.
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  10. My daughter also had a lot of trouble memorizing the times tables. Have you heard of Timez Attack? It's a computer game for learning the times tables. I got it for my daughter and she learned all her times tables through 12 in just a couple months, after spending about a year on it trying to memorize them the traditional way. http://www.bigbrainz.com/
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  11. Marci -- Yes, I had heard of Timez Attack, but I couldn't remember the name of it to look it up. Thank you! I've been trying to remember that all week.

    Dawn -- I'll look up Memorize in Minutes (or hours, as the case may be), too. I've got to find something.
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  12. Here's an idea from my hubby (a math tutor): Take a deck of cards and remove the face cards. Write a large 1 on the Aces. There are a bunch of games you can now play. War - split the deck. Each player turns over a card. The first to come up with the sum (difference, product, whatever) gets the two cards. You could take one card out and then go through the deck adding (subtracting, etc.) the rest of the numbers to that card. When they're ready for negative numbers, make the black cards positive, and the red cards negative and play the games again. My hubby uses several of these variations with his students - several of whom are high schoolers in upper level math who needed significant math facts review. Oh, and you can come up with some kind of reward for number of cards gotten correct or speed of drill, or something like that. Hope that helps!!
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  13. Where did you get the brain hats?? I love those! We'll be covering different internal systems in a few weeks for General Science and I would definitely use those.

    How old is Megan? Fox is 13 and still has the same issues with Math. Each summer I say I'll use the summer to cement the info...but I've yet to follow through.
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  14. I gasped when I saw those brain hats. They are wicked cool. But then I gulped when I saw the price of Nutrition 101. Although it's probably top notch, I just cannot afford 80 bucks for ONE subject :(

    I wish that I could find a pattern for those brain hats though. My kids would LOVE them...
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  15. SB -- I posted the link for the brain hats in last week's wrap-up. I meant to include it in this week's, but forgot. It's not part of the Nutrition 101 curriculum (which I would NOT be using if I hadn't received it free to review...I couldn't afford it either).
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  16. I finally got this linked on my Salt Dough Map lens. I love the adaptation to anatomy. We'll be doing human body next year, and I'll definitely keep this in mind for projects.
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