amandaspace1330

Yet again I find myself playing catch-up. We have enjoyed two busy and exciting weeks. We have read two great books, and learned heaps! We visited the Philadelphia Zoo, and went on two local hikes. We have celebrated another year of Ana's life. So exciting! Two weeks ago, we read the story The Little Red Lighthouse and The Great Gray Bridge, by Hildegarde Swift. This fictional story, personifies the George Washington Bridge in New York City and the little red lighthouse that stands beside it. We learned that the George Washington Bridge gets more vehicular traffic than any other bridge in the world! Pretty amazing! Our vocabulary words: Girders, Cables, Catwalk, Anxious. The children enjoyed the different voices of the little red lighthouse and we noticed the text size increased and decreased with the lighthouse's self confidence. For Math we tried our hand at simple multiplication and division problems (if 20 crew men are working on the bridge and five men take lunch at o...

I failed to blog about our last two weeks of school, and the Easter holiday that fell right in the middle. We read Make Way For Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey and The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf. I'll begin with Make Way for Ducklings. Robert McCloskey's  Make Way for Ducklings is a true classic. The children love this story, children have loved this story since it's original printing in 1942. Our vocabulary words this week were about ducks, Molt, Incubate. For Math we practiced simple multiplication and division. If all eight ducklings need to eat two snails for lunch, how many snails are eaten? If it takes 28 days for a duck egg to hatch, and a week has 7 days, how many weeks does a duck incubate? Etc. For Social Studies and Geography we learned about Boston and looked for clues to the past in the story's illustrations. Science was all about ducks. Art mostly involved studying McCloskey's pictures, learning about the lithographic proce...

Last week our story was They Were Strong and Good, by Robert Lawson. Robert Lawson shares his family tree and some stories from his parents and grandparents.  It won the Caldecott Medal in 1941. While reading this story we enjoyed renaming his grandparents with our family names, my mother's mother became Nana, etc. while we read. The illustrations in this story are thoughtfully done and capture culture and history as well as illustrating the text. Our vocabulary words this week: Brig, Battery, Scotch; Caribbean. We discussed the title of this story, the words give power and make you want to find out who was "strong and good"? And we discussed how two different books may have a similar theme. We compared this story to The Ox Cart Man, by Barbara Cooney. For Math: we counted and graphed the animals in the story. We reviewed shapes, focusing on the geometrics and remembering how many sides each shape has. We did some adding and subtracting using the cannon...