Week One - A Retrospective

In a nutshell: so far, so good! Hunter woke up every day asking when 'school at home' was going to start (even though we are only doing Monday, Wednesday, Friday). In the first two days, he ripped through all of the math concepts I had planned out for the first two weeks. So I will be speeding up the math a little bit, and moving into patterns next week. On the flipside, printing seems to be a bit of a challenge for Hunter, so we will definitely be taking our time with that (ahhh, the beauty of homeschool...)

This week, we worked on printing the letters A, a, B, b, C, and c, Hunter is already good to go on knowing his letters and the sounds they make (thank you amazing leapfrog dvd!), so that provides a good foundation for learning how to write the letters himself. We are also working through a sight words book collection, and Hunter is able to read these great little books all by himself (I have to cover up the pictures though, because he likes to cheat and say what's in the picture, rather than go to the trouble of sounding out words :o)

I was trying to get Hunter to look at me and smile for this picture, but he kept working and said "I'm really busy!"

In math, we did a few worksheets and hands-on activities related to the concept of same/different. I am really loving our Brain Quest PreK workbook, as well as our Spectrum Math workbook. The spectrum book is illustrated by Mercer Mayer - Hunter has a book called 'Daddy and Me' that is a Mercer Mayer book, so he calls his spectrum math book his 'Daddy and Me Workbook' :o). I find both of these books to be really colorful and simple, and so far, Hunter really looks forward to using them.

I ran out of math for Hunter this morning, so he did this worksheet on shapes and colors...

In science, our topic for the week was 'Animals have different kinds of bodies' (by the way, I've taken all of our science and social studies topics from this book) We read a little bit about some general animal classifications - insects/spiders, birds, fish, reptiles/amphibians, and mammals. Hunter finished putting together the chart that we had started on Monday - his favorite part was seeing pictures of himself, and our dog, Charley, in the mammals category :o)

After completing the chart, we relaxed on the couch for awhile and watched two episodes of 'Bill Nye the Science Guy' (the insects and amphibians episodes, of course!)

Next week, we will be working on letter D-F, and moving on to patterns in math. In addition, we will be learning about the different ways that animals move.