Parts of Speech board

Oh, Wii. I love you, but your remotes always need batteries. Always!

I could not find any batteries a few days ago so I decided to kinda/sorta clean out the junk drawer in hopes of finding some lost batteries. As usual, this task ended up just being a treasure hunt for the kids. One of the more popular treasures I found was a plastic bag full of poetry word magnets from before the kids were born.

The kids were enjoying making sentences like, "Her elaborate spider makes fancy pie," and I saw in this an educational opportunity for the upcoming week. I divided a dry erase board up into the 8 parts of speech (conjunction, adjective, adverb, preposition, pronoun, noun, verb, interjection) with a corner blocked off for "spies." Spies change names (parts of speech) depending on their environment (use in a sentence.) Tricky ones, those spies.

The next day, I had El grab a word out of the bag and place it where it belonged on the board. If it was a spy, he was supposed to use it at least 2 different ways and tell me what part of speech it was as used in those different ways. It was awesome and fun for about 5 minutes. Then it was complicated and confusing. Apparently the fantastic combo of Mad Libs, FLL3, and Grammarland do not a grammar master make.

Today, I picked 10 words out of the bag that could only go into one of the 8 parts of speech section and a few more that were "spies." I kept these 2 groups divided and told him which group was composed of spies and which group was composed of words that would only fit into one part of speech. This made it a lot easier since he wasn't holding up every word and saying, "is this a spy?" Again, he had to use spies in at least 2 sentences and tell me what part of speech the spy took on in each sentence. How much of this was he able to do on his own? Probably 75%. I definitely think it was a good learning experience.

Overall, the project was a success once we simplified on the second day. I wouldn't use this with Em because she has not yet learned the parts of speech well enough to not be confused by my spy section (and the little section I made for articles within the adjective sections.) However, for a third or fourth grader this was a pretty fun and helpful.

(And we still had to go to CVS for more AA batteries. Of course, the extras were then thrown haphazardly into the junk drawer.)

Update

I have been a bad blogger lately. I haven't been doing weekly updates or even weekly blogs. I have (mostly) kept up on adding to the reading list on the What We're Reading tab, but that's about all I've done. Hopefully I can get back into it eventually.

• First of all, Em decided that (despite having never been taught cursive) she will now write everything in cursive. I didn't quite know what to do with this information. This is a total 180 from El, who moans and groans if I require something to be written in cursive.

Em's new cursive-esque writing

She doesn't want to do any worksheets or practicing, though, and I don't want to make her do them. Remember, she is only 6 and won't be technically homeschooled until this fall (she's my public school kid for another few weeks.) We finally found a way that she would watch and practice without it feeling like "work." The answer was a pan filled with rice. I can show her how the curve traces back over itself easier than I could on a dry erase board. I just left the pan by the kitchen and she practices letters while I cook dinner.

• We finished two read-alouds last week: Book 3 in C.S. Lewis's Narnia series and book 3 in Jeanne Birdsall's Penderwicks series. The kids listened to the first 2 Penderwicks books on CD and I didn't listen with them. The third book was just released last year, though, so it wasn't available as an audiobook yet. I read this one aloud, and I must say: Wow. I was very impressed. We will be re-reading these books in a year or two when the next one is released. These are well-written, funny, heartwarming books that were an absolute joy to read out loud. It is probably written more for girls, but both of my kids loved the series. 

El's drawing of a carpenter ant, from Draw 50 Creepy Crawlies

Ulmus Glabra, watercolor by El

• Today El studied plate tectonics. We began by reading The Island that Moved, which was a nice introduction to the subject. He then watched a free brainpop video on plate tectonics, which was nice & fun, and a bozemanscience video on the subject, which was very helpful as always. He finished up by drawing and labeling 3 types of plate boundaries (convergent, divergent, and tranform) and finding examples of these on the globe. Our Kingfisher and Usborne science encyclopedias didn't have quite what we were looking for on the topic, but the USGS had a very informative page with diagrams.

El's Lego representation of Magellan's fleet at the beginning of his circumnavigation journey

• El wants to recommend two educational games this week: Questionaut and the iPad app Stack the States. 

• We will probably finish Singapore 3A in a couple of weeks. Now that El has conquered long division, it has been smooth sailing through math lately. The exception is the word problems in the Singapore "Challenging Word Problems" book. Wow. Some of those are really hard, but I guess a challenge a day keeps the restlessness away, right? :) Hopefully we can push through 3B this summer and be on grade level next year in fourth grade.

• We have finished 75 of our 89 grammar lessons and I still haven't decided whether or not to continue with the next level of First Language Lessons. It's awesome, it's easy, it gets done... but it is so auditory that it doesn't stick. A very generous homeschooler gave me a set of Junior Analytical Grammar (teacher's manual & workbook) that had been partially used and totally erased. Hopefully that will cover grammar for next year and hopefully that grammar will stick. I honestly don't foresee FLL 4 happening next year.

That's a bit of a wrap-up, eh? I'll try to post more later this week.

Visual-Spatial Learners

While I don't think I would say that El can't learn in other ways, I can easily say that he learns best by seeing. I can tell him something or he can write it down, but half of the time he has no idea what I said or even what he wrote. Give him the book, though, and he's got it. Luckily, I'm not that great at explaining things verbally anyway. ;)

What this means to us during school is that things must be shown whenever possible. He uses "Rainbow Words" to practice difficult spelling words...

And handmade color-coded value discs to learn tricky new math concepts.

Of course this means that art is always a favorite subject...

...as is nature studies.

Welcome Spring

Here's a recipe for disaster*

8 oz. water

1 tsp. dish soap (Ours was pink.)

1 tsp. vinegar

Glitter, if you have it (We didn't.)

*(I don't know. "Tornado in a Cup" just didn't sound quite as thrilling.)

Mix it together quickly, pull out the spoon and you have a mini-tornado in a glass. Enjoy!

We have had beautiful weather during these past two weeks, but Em was down with a bit of stomach bug last week and El has been working at about half-speed due to a combination of allergies, Dimetapp and a cold. Not a great time to start long division, but we did it anyway. Once again, I am extremely thankful for Maria Miller's math teaching videos. Here's a link to her How to Teach Long Division post with video.

We are enjoying reading Grammar-Land as a supplement to FLL, and El is completing these helpful worksheets (by Jessica Cain) as we go through that book. Everything else is business as usual around here (except that we are outside as often as we can be!)

Kids Disc Golfing

Library co-op mornings...

...greatly decrease afternoon productivity in all subjects other than "reading."

(It's okay. I'm distracted by piles of new books too.)

Last Week & Next Year

Guess who is on a much needed break week this week? That's right: We are! :D

Last week was the 6th week of our spring semester. We finished up Unit II in math with two step word problems (where the first step was not specifically explained.) This was kind of tricky, when all previous problems have been spelled out in separate parts (i.e. "part a" asks you one thing and then "part b" draws upon part b's answer.) El also got into "turning sentences into the language of algebra" in Primary Grade Challenge Math, which he does once a week. This was definitely fun and I think it will help make those Singapore word problems a little easier.

El also participated in a homeschool Valentine's Day exchange, for which he sent and received Valentines from all over the country. He had a great time opening all the envelopes on Tuesday (Valentine's Day) and marking them on a map.

 

El's third grade art notebook is filling up nicely! Here is a sketch of a Ruby-throated Hummingbird:

Last week, our artist study was Andrew Wyeth, a twentieth century realist painter.

We had some "unsolicited science" moments when the kids decided to use marshmallows, chocolate chips, and food coloring to make a replica of a carbon atom:

...and when El spent a morning putting together a suspension bridge from a Scholastic kit:

In "Next Year" news, I think I finally picked a Latin program. This is big news, because there's really nowhere to go after finishing our current book. Getting Started with Latin is a one-book wonder and goes no farther than just... getting started with Latin. I looked at probably 10 different programs, before finally deciding on Galore Park's Latin Prep 1. If Galore Park works well for us, it could be El's Latin program for the next four years or so, which would be wonderful. It's strange, though. Despite Latin being an integral part of classical education, I had no intention of starting it so young (even though many start Latin even younger, with programs like Minimus and Song School Latin.) It has turned out to be one of El's favorite subjects and I have been very impressed with how much  easier it is to understand English grammar and vocabulary once you start to learn a classical language.

Wrap Up: Sem. 2, Wk. 5

• This week in math has been a lot of review of addition and subtraction word problems. El has been learning when to use the comparison bar model and when to use the part-whole bar model.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about.

• Grammar has us working on prepositions, prepositional phrases, and the objects of prepositions. Thankfully, no diagramming of prepositional phrases this year.
• El is working on  "fact v. opinion" in writing. He is still having a bit of a hard time differentiating between the two.
• In science, we learned about Sally Fox and we went through another "states of matter" chemistry lesson.
• History was definitely here, there and everywhere this week. Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, and... early American civilizations? Yeah. No flow, but whatever.
• For our Friday "building construction" discussion (I have to figure out what to call this: Architecture? Construction? Legos in Real Life?) we talked about steel beams and steel-reinforced concrete beams. We also learned about elastic v. plastic deformation & deflection.  
• We started The Hobbit two weeks ago and I think we're now 3/4 of the way through the book. The kids absolutely LOVE it!
• We were supposed to go to the library today but it is super snowy, yucky, and cold outside so instead we ate microwaved S'mores.  We'll get to the library sometime in the next few days.

Here are a couple of El's latest drawings:

Map of his "ideal city." In geography, we have been reviewing cardinal and ordinal directions and learning a little about cartography.

El practices drawing birds

Pyrimids of Giza, another drawing inspired by the Draw 50 Buildings book.

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Em finally decided she was ready to start learning some guitar chords. Here she is, rocking an Em (E minor) chord. She learned Em and A7, and she did a great job!