I have been lazy with blogging this week. We continued to row Katy and the Big Snow. We discussed running a big city, personification (which was a review and she did very well remembering what it meant), responsibilities (the activity was cleaning her room! Tricky Mama…)
Doo’s reading skills continue to grow at a pretty rapid pace. She amazed Mama by reading the entire Katy and the Big Snow to her for the last two ROWings with very little help.
Since Katy and the Big Snow deals with a huge snowstorm we decided to talk about weather today. Doo listed some types of weather, such as cloudy and rainy, and we watched some of The Weather Channel. We saw that her Tia will probably get snow tomorrow and we also saw that a place in North Dakota will be -50 tomorrow! Egads! Los Angeles will be a very agreeable 67 degrees, thank goodness.
Doo also read weather words and matched them to their picture. She read, without help, “windy, cloudy, rainy, sunny, snowflake, lightning, rainbow and thermometer” (I am guessing she saw the thermometer picture and knew what the word said but I’m not positive). The only word she stumbled on was blizzard – she sounded it out but produced the “ar” part wrong and did not know what the word meant (California girl!). Her reading is coming along really nicely and we have yet to do anything formal for it yet minus her playing on the Reading Eggs site every once in a while.
After two weeks off we were ready to get back to our Five in a Row lessons. We’re rowing Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton (Doo read the cover to me and only needed help with “Virginia”). The story is about a large plow who is needed to dig out the (fake) city of Geoppolis after a very large snowstorm. The story shows how Katy the plow’s job is very important to help the city run efficiently.
We covered a lot under the theme of snow today (math, cooking, science). I included some of the activities we missed from our Yule plans due to Doo’s illness. We baked Frosty Snow Ball Cookies. They came out very well (the dough was crumbly, which made me nervous, but the finished product was approved by all).
We read a little bit about snow and looked at some snowflakes. While watching the two videos below, we talked about how where we live we do not see snow (except on the mountains) but that Auntie in Maine and Tia in Ohio often see snowstorms in the winter.
For seat work, Doo figured out what snowflakes were missing in this activity without any help from me. She also completed a dot-to-dot snowman while counting each number as she went along. We then played snowman memory and counted the pairs at the end of the game. I showed Doo what counting by 2s looked like as well.
I was told, yet again, how much she loves homeschooling. Me too.
