October 2015

Reading
Reading is going well. I am trying to get Gwen up to Miles's level, which she is not far from. However, I fear that while I slow Miles down a little bit in order to push Gwen faster, I'm doing him a disservice. I feel like if he were in public school, he would be a more fluent reader than he is now. Not that he is struggling, he is very bright, I'm just not pushing him as much as I possibly could. I'm hoping to have both kids reading on their own and fluently by the end of the year. It will make things SO much easier.

I tried to do a few more fun things to help them with sight words. One of which was simply writing the words on cups and then having them build towers with the cups. The catch is that every time they stack a cup, they have to say the word written on it.



Math
Math is math. We're plugging along and enjoying it. So far, it's nothing new, so the kids are doing just fine and think it's great. The only tough time we had with math this month is when Gwen had to trace some 5's. 5's are hard. :)

Science
We're still studying different invertebrates. We were lucky enough to find a praying mantis on our front porch early on in October. We gave it a nice little home in a mason jar and watched it intensely. We looked online, and found that praying mantis's only eat live bugs. I managed to catch a few flies and put them in the jar. The kids were equally amazed and terrified as they watched the praying mantis catch and devour the fly. Then we watched the same thing, but online this time with extreme close-ups. That was enough to even creep me out a little!
We also studied ants. I even bought an ant farm online. We were so excited when it got here, only to find out it didn't come with any ants. So I ordered some ants, we put them in the farm, started taking notes, and then all the ants died. Literally, every single ant died within a few days. I still need to see if I can get a refund or replacement. Boo.


Geography
Midway through September we started talking about Africa. We started learning the Singing' Smart song to learn all the countries in Africa, opened our Africa envelope with pictures of Africa and other fun tid-bits like African money. We've tried to read books from Africa, and hopefully we'll wrap it up in a few weeks.

History
We hosted homeschool group once this month, and that particular week we were studying ancient China. We learned about how silk is made, ate some "authentic" Chinese rice with chopsticks, made paper dragon puppets, listened to traditional Chinese music, and practiced painting pictograms.


We also had a super fun ancient Africa/Halloween Party day.


I counted Halloween as a homeschool project. :) The kids decided with an ancient Egyptian theme, which I was super excited about. Miles was a Mummy, Gwen was Hatshepsut, Lindy was an archaeologist (Lindiana Jones). :)


Joy School
This month for Gwen's joy school, we went to a pumpkin patch for our field trip! Sadly, my camera died right as we arrived. We also had a fun Halloween party in addition to the regular school days.