Posted in The Story About Ping
|
It was a very cold and lazy morning, so we all snuggled in bed until about 9:15, just talking and laughing. Isn't that one of the best things about homeschooling? We can just go with the flow, playing and snuggling when our kids need it the most!
We started school around 11:00 after eating breakfast and finishing chores. We began with Lesson Two of Leading Little Ones To God, entitled We Cannot See God. This was a great lesson and explained very well that God is all spirit, with no body like we have. It referenced the story about Moses where God hid him between two rocks and passed by to give him a very small glimpse of His glory. DS was amazed when we read the part about Moses' face shining as bright as the sun when he came down from the mountain!
Then, we read The Story About Ping for the second time, and I think he liked it even more this time! He shouted out the master's call every time we got to that part...so funny! We read the story of Jonah from another children's book we found in our home library. It was neat to find the parrallels between Ping and Jonah. Like Ping, Jonah tried to run away and hide from his Master, but because of his disobedience, he faced fear, loneliness, and danger. In the end, they both ended up having to still do the very thing that they were running from and face the consequences of disobedience. This opened up a good discussion about doing what is right and facing up to the punishments of our wrong actions.
Then we had a short literature lesson in "fiction" vs. "non-fiction". We focused on what a fiction book is (a story out of the author's imagination) and how a lot of fiction books start with "Once upon a time", just like Ping and the short story DS wrote yesterday. So, back we went to our home library on a quest to find "fiction" books! Believe it or not, we could only find one other one that started with "Once upon a time" and we have a lot of books! This was good, though, because it forced DS to think about each book to determine if it was fiction or not. He did a good job and I think he understands this terminology now. He's also learned "author" and "illustrator" this week.
We decided to move onto a geography lesson. We looked up where China is on a world map and I showed him how it's all the way across a large ocean. Then, we looked at a smaller country map of China. We found the Yangtze river and DS traced it with a yellow marker, since Ping tells us that the water in the river is yellow. We talked about how the river is the 3rd largest in the whole world, with 350 million people living on it, and in some places it is so wide that you can't see the opposite shore. Since we just got home from the beach, he was able to use that as a comparison. We also looked up an American flag and a Chinese flag online and talked about how every country has a flag to represent it. DS colored a flag of China printout for our lapbook that we will put together over the weekend.
We moved onto penmanship after this and DS finished what he started on Day One. The two sentences he had to write were:
"They play in it." "They have webbed feet."
He did a really good job and he's getting better at letter placement and spacing in between his words when he is copying from another source. He added the picture in the frame above the writing. It's upside down, but it's 3 ducks in a pond with a yellow sky and a tree at the top. We are really enjoying using Draw Write Now for handwriting and learning to draw.
For math, we got out our Saxon K book and manipulatives. We used linking cubes to create ABB color patterns and to review one-to-one correspondence. Then, with the teddy bear counters, we worked on ordinal placement from first to fourth. Here's a picture of him using the teddy bear counters:
For reading practice, DS read the second story in Friends Old And New entitled Tim's Haircut.
For Art, we looked through Ping and studied the different ways that the illustrator gave the illusion of water: reflections, ripples, and movement lines. Then, using the book as a reference, DS tried his hand at drawing water. He used colored pencils and did a great job imitating the work of Kurt Wiese:
In Science, we learned about reflecting light, to tie in with the reflections on the water in the book. We filled the sink with water and looked at our own reflections in the water. Then, we laid a large mirror on the floor and put objects on top to see their reflections. We talked about how a reflection is light bouncing off of a shiny surface. We demonstrated this by placing a hand mirror into the sun and watching the light bounce off onto the wall. DS thought this was great fun and played with the mirror for about 15 minutes! Isn't it great that we can have so much fun as homeschoolers? In a public school, he would never have the opportunity to just play around with a science experiment in order to learn more about it. I love to see him enjoying learning!
We have been reading Charlie and The Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl as a read-aloud, so we finished our day with Chapter 6. DS loves this book and it's helping with his listening skills, since I ask him questions when the chapter is over.
Click here to see a fun "Chocolate" mini-unit I did with DS last week!
That's it for Day 2, can't wait for Day 3!
|
Comments
|
|
|
|
|
Posted by