Week 29

MATH
Caleb is on Lesson 26 in his Math book.  He continues to learn subtraction facts, practice the addition and subtraction he already knows, and take a test each week.

LANGUAGE ARTS
Caleb practiced the consonant blends SH, SL, and SM this week, writing, reading, and drawing pictures that use words with those blends.  This week Caleb picked out several books to read, aloud and together, including two stories by Mo Willems, The Wolf's Chicken Stew, In the Fiddle is a Song, and a fun book of poems.  Caleb also chose two non-fiction books to read, one about sharks and one called Beastly Tales, a book about Big Foot, Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster.  The shark book inspired his SH picture page where a friendly shark shuts his mouth when asked, and he also wrote a page about something he learned in Beastly Tales.

SCIENCE / S.S.
We continue to read books that give Caleb a good idea of what life was like in America over the past couple hundred years.  We also continue to work on our Spanish exercises and in addition to practicing the songs, words, and simple phrases, this week there was a history lesson about Moctezuma, the Aztecs, and the Spanish conquest of Mexico.  A Spanish-speaking parrot puppet made the lesson fun!

For Science we are back outside, learning and making observations about nature and Spring.  We did everything from digging in the garden, looking for birds, and following the wind with Caleb's weather vane.  We read a story about apple trees and this week we are going to look for fruit trees with buds.  "I saw a little bird that was sitting on my dad's van!  It was being really still and I tried to take a picture of it, but it flew away right before I could take the picture.  It made me sad!"

While we are studying nature in Spring, I told Caleb he could also pick anything to learn about and make a science or s.s. lapbook.  He picked the Loch Ness Monster!  This week he made a mini-book that shows the type of dinosaur a creature living in Loch Ness could resemble today.  He has learned where in the world Loch Ness is and the many different ways scientists have tried to find and study the famous "monster."  "I think the Loch Ness Monster is really, really cool.  I think it could be real because other animals used to just be myths, like the the Komodo dragon and the Mountain Gorilla.  They ended up being proved to be real!"

ART
Caleb got to paint pictures with friends this week.  He also started a project for a recycled art contest he is going to enter.  He used beautiful pictures from old calendars and weaved them together to make a basket.  "We got two eggs, my mom poked a hole in the top and bottom, and I used a straw to blow out the egg.  It made a silly sound when the eggs came running out!  Now I have two pretty eggs to put in my recycled Easter basket, and we made scrambled eggs for lunch so the shell really is recycled too."   

P.E.
Caleb had fun exercising with friends this week.  They went for a walk, played ball catching games, and crawled through outdoor tunnels.