What We Studied

It took a few days, but we caught up with our curriculum. We made a lot of progress in all of our subjects and even had a great field trip with our coop friends.

Literature and Poetry

Continuing with our reading of Race to the Sun. We are about 50 pages from the end, but thankfully I built in a break week from our read aloud. We are going to finish Race to the Sun next week and then move into Japanese Folktales. We also covered a few picture book studies for our fall theme.

• Race to the Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

• Plum by Tony Mitton

• Scarecrow by Cynthia Rylant

• Stellaluna by Janell Cannon

• I Need My Monster by Amanda Noll

• Hey, That’s My Monster by Amanda Roll

• Pumpkin Jack by Will Hubbell

• In November by Cynthia Rylant

• “Robin Hood and His Merry Men” from Favorite Medieval Tales by Mary Pope Osborne

Math

We’re still working through Unit 3 about multiplication and division. We probably have one more week in this unit before we will move on.

• Singapore Math Common Core Edition 3A

• Primarily Logic

Social Studies

This week was all about the Ancient Puebloans and Cahokia. We covered both of these civilizations last year in our first year of U.S. History, but it was nice to cover them again. We found some great videos about each of these groups and the ruins that are left. We hope to visit at least Cahokia in the next few years.

• DK Timelines of Everyone

• When on Earth

• DK History

• DK Timelines of Everything

• Journey to Cahokia by Albert Lorenze and Joy Schleh

• Secrets of Mesa Verde by Gail Foy

• Cliff Dwellings: A Hidden World by Kevin Blake

Arthur Independent Time

To allow for one-on-one time with Quentin, I have added an hour of independent work time for Arthur. Each week, he will have a mix of packet work (mostly grammar and math review), independent reading time, and special projects. Many of his projects will be aligned with our literature selections (some taken from B&R Language Arts curriculum) and history. This week, he focused on packet work and some random building projects.

Science and STEAM Coop

Continuing with our Dinosaur unit from Blossom and Root! We covered the Carboniferous and Permian periods. We also had a great coop meeting where the kids learned about Big Time and the history of life on earth. Afterward, the kids pretended to be paleontologists and worked on their own fossil digs.

• Everything Awesome About Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Beasts by Mike Lowery

• The Story of Life: Evolution by Katie Scott

• Life: The First Four Billion Years by Martin Jenkins

• When the Whales Walked and Other Incredibly Evolutionary Journeys by Dougal Dixon

• Prehistoric: Before the Dinosaurs by David West

• DK Prehistoric

• DK Where on Earth? Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Life

• DK Find Out! Dinosaurs

• DK Eyewitness Dinosaur

• Dinosaurium by Chris Wormed and Lily Murray Preface

• Prehistoric by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld

• Dinothesaurus: Prehistoric Poems and Paintings by Douglas Florian

• Dinosaur Feathers by Dennis Nolan

• I am NOT a Dinosaur by Will Lach

Art/Music

Nothing this week

Quentin

I have scheduled at least four 1-hour time blocks for one-on-one time with Quentin. I bought Blossom and Root’s Early Years Volume 2 curriculum to use as our base. I love the variety of activities and some of the bigger projects included. For ELA, we continued our big overview of the alphabet. We covered more counting and some basic math concepts as well as simple map skills. And we had some puzzles to round out the week. We also finished big unit on transportation.

ELA

• Once Upon an Alphabet by Oliver Jeffers

• My “s” Sound Box by Jane Belk Moncure

• Sammy Skunk’s Super Sniffer by Barbara deRubertis

• My “t” Sound Box by Jane Belk Moncure

• Tessa Tiger’s Temper Tantrum by Barbara deRubertis

Math

Other

• Let’s Go on a Train by Rosalyn Albert

• Truck and Train by Hannah Stark

• Chugga Chugga Choo Choo by Emma Garcia

• Locomotive by Brian Floca

• Three Grumpy Trucks by Todd Tarpley

• What a Nice Car by Anita Bijsterbosch

• Our Car by J.M. Brum

• Diggersaurus by Michael Whaite

• My Side of the Car by Kate Feiffer

• I Like My Car by Michael Robertson

• Let’s Go on the Plane by Rosalyn Albert

• Let’s Go on a Rocket by Rosalyn Albert

• How Does it Work? Airplanes by Jenny Fretland VanVoorst

• Let’s Go on a Ferry by Rosalyn Albert

• Lightship by Brian Floca

• Boats Speeding! Sailing! Cruising! by Patricia Hubbell

• Let’s Go on a Tractor by Rosalyn Albert

• If I Built a Car by Chris van Dusen

• Red Truck, Yellow Truck by Michelle Robinson

• I Drive a Snowplow by Sarah Bridges

• Race Car Count by Rebecca Kai Dotlich

• Thunder Trucks by Cheryl Klein & Katy Beebe

Field Trip

We headed to Schramm State Park to look for fossils at the geologic site. It was cold and a bit windy, we had a great morning with our friends. We found a ton of crinoids and some coral pieces in the rocks. I love that we we can visit someplace that has exposed rocks from when Nebraska was underwater 350 million years ago.

Documentary Selection

I have carved out a one hour time block each week to watch a documentary related to our studies. We didn’t actually watch anything this week, but made up for it by all the PBS Eons videos for our dinosaur unit.

Misc. - Random picture books read

• What Kind of Car Does a T. rex Drive? by Mark Lee

• Here we Go Digging for Dinosaur Bones by Susan Lendroth

• Ten Timid Ghosts by Jennifer O’Connell

• Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson

• The Girl and the Dinosaur by Hollie Hughes

• The Leaf Thief by Alice Hemming

• Counting on Fall by Lizann Flatt

High

• Looking for fossils was delightful! We will definitely have to revisit Schramm sometime very soon.

Low

• Um… I cannot think of anything right now.

Next Week

• Finishing Race to the Sun and starting Japanese Folktales

• Moving to Asia and the Mongol Empire for history

• Wrapping up multiplication and division

• Finally getting to the Triassic for the Dinosaur Unit

• Covering dinosaurs for coop! (We’re hosting!)

Next up on the TBR pile: