First Day of School....kinda

This is our "preview" week, kind of a trial run for school in September.  I'm trying out Five in a Row with the younger two.  I want to see if it is challenging and interesting enough for Shannon and not too much of a stretch for Kodi.  The older two are finishing up Ancient Civilizations Vol. 1 (the Ancient China section), but they are using the unit study pdf directly and seeing if they can handle it without my assistance.  This is practice for September when they will be assigned sections for Ancient Civilizations Vol. 2 (Greece then Rome) and have to go to the pdf directly for the lesson plan.  

I read the book, "Storm in the Night" to Shannon and Kodi.   They seemed to enjoy the story more than I expected.  They sat quietly for the most part.  I don't know if I can read it to them again though.  It was sweet and the night illustrations were great, but it was slow moving and I don't know if they will want to read it twice.  We'll have to see if reading these FIAR stories five days in a row doesn't make us crazy.  Afterwards we talked about grandparents, telling stories from childhood, and also fears.

Next we discussed onomatopoeia.  I read some poems with onomatopoeia.  We did a craft hanging onomatopoeic words on raindrops from an umbrella.  Kodi was able to sound out "snap" and "bam" to write them down.  He also liked the word "whoosh" and even though I spelled it for him the first time, he decided to write it in tiny letters over and over on the drop.  Shannon took a few tries before she deemed her umbrella acceptable, so this craft took longer than expected, which was fine.  As you can see, she wrote "words" multiple times on her umbrella, not sure why.  She also had fun making a very large raindrop and a very tiny raindrop.  These aren't as pretty as the ones you see online, but they were made with supplies we had on hand and mostly done by the kids themselves.  :)

Next we discussed personification (and they came to the realization that  most  kids' movies have personified animals/objects).  We read some poems with personification ("April Rain Song" by Langston Hughes, "The Train" by Emily Dickinson and "Hey Diddle Diddle") Did a game where they gave me 10 nouns and 10 verbs on slips of paper, we put them in two cups and pulled one of each and tried to make a sentence where we personified the noun. Took a few tries for them to get the hang of it.  Shannon kept having herself do the action with the object instead.  Two of our sentences were, "The scissors run across my paper, chomping it in two" and "The tree boughs fly in the wind".  Bough is one of our vocabulary words, bonus points!  

After that, Shannon did three sentences with nouns/verbs on her own and wrote them down.  Then I corrected them and she wrote them down again, neater.  She also decided she had to do illustrations.  So she added drawings of a caterpillar jumping for  "The caterpillar jumps from leaf to leaf", a book within a book within a book (an example of recursion, something she just learned about from Daddy!) for "The book flies through my mind" and a toaster looking at her hand rubbing her tummy, "The toaster hears me say, "I'm hungry".  We ended up discussing quotation marks because of this sentence.   She is getting the hang of them even though she is making them too large.

Kodi wrote his capital letters, then he wrote his lowercase letters. He writes very small and neatly for a 5 year old.  Then he did the Easy Peasy online slideshow of a few sight words (a, and, rat, cat) and read a sentence with those words.  He did the next slideshow (the, has, at, Ann) but kept getting stumped on one of them, so even though he wanted to move on, I told him to take a break and go back to it and try again later today. 

They both did math.  Kodi did 2 exercises in 1A, Shannon did 5 in 2A.  She is flying through multiplication, it is one of those things that comes easily to her.  Kodi is up to the last review in his 1A workbook.  I might have him finish it today if he is up to it.

Maddy and Mia did Ancient China and got through sections 5.2 and 5.3 and started 5.4 in the 3 hours they worked.  I will only be assigning them two sections a week in September so I think that will work out when they have other subjects to worry about. 

Then at noon it started to downpour and they begged to go outside and run in the rain.  

The fun ended when Kodi came inside crying that something out back "smelled really bad".  I guess that something got smeared on his face (looked like mud) so he couldn't get rid of the smell!  Poor guy was distraught over this odor.  So showers for everyone!  Mia and Shannon said they just took a shower outside, but I convinced them they would feel warmer if they took one inside too.