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This week I began Five in a Row properly with Anastasia. We spent the week on, The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar, by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock. This is such a beautiful story. The illustrations pair well with the rich text. (I am so excited to be back to the old lesson plans! Definitely we are not doing as much as I did with Tristan, however, Ana is benefiting from his second grade lessons as well. I love the home-learning environment.) We learned about horses- obviously- flora and fauna, Nantucket, seasons review, simile and metaphor and emotions. We counted horses by tens, and splatter painted. With Ana learning needs to be active and hands-on. We were making simile together while changing her sheets, "the sheets float to the bed like leaves fall from the trees" etc. She has a shorter attention span for books. This is an area I need adjustment. I have had such a "books" emphasis because of Tristan's love of literature. Ana loves to play and do! She also ...

Last week we borrowed Sarah Dees' new book Awesome LEGO Creations with Bricks You Already Have. I'm excited that Tristan wanted to borrow this book and actually opened it up and tried some of the projects. Turns out, we didn't have all the recommended pieces, however, we were able to improvise. What a great mind stretching and confidence building afternoon we had. For more from Sarah Dees, check out her blog:  Frugal Fun for Boys . This is his dragon and one of the little cars. (we did not build outside, these were brought outside after being assembled)

This week we read a few exciting books. Since we are now finished with the Frances Study Guide, I used The Raft, by Jim LaMarche as Anastasia's book for this week. This is a beautifully illustrated story about a young boy discovering his love of nature and art. It captures the river habitat perfectly, and allows the reader to explore the river with Nicky (the story's main character). We did a scaled down Five in a Row style unit. She made a character map, narrated the story to me and learned about muskrats. Every morning for the past two weeks we've worked on identifying pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters and making patterns using the coins. She still struggles to get them all straight. The Raft, was one of Tristan's books for science class. He learned about rivers this week as we continued our Earth science unit. This story worked well for both children. Tristan also enjoyed a few other books exploring rivers and their habitats (see book list below). We al...