Teaching Tuesdays - Week 11 - Catching up and Thanksgiving projects

This week, I worked to get Josh caught up a little bit in areas we are running behind - math and phonics.  He enjoys doing the math worksheets and, quite honestly, they are super easy (with only 3-5 problems on a page.  Doubling up lessons has been easy and we'll continue it this coming week.  In phonics we finished up our alphabet review and actually started true phonics this week.  I told Darryl he might need to teach the short vowel lesson where Josh has to master the vowels blending with all sorts of letters because, well, I never learned phonics and, holy cow, it's hard to learn it at my age HA!  This week we have also started working through a workbook on money.

This week we started talking about the Penny.  My boys both love money so this is a good thing to work on!

Nate loves school - loves his workbook pages, learning sight words and this book:

Yep, mazes!  These are good for his fine motor skills and well, they are just fun.  I had purchased both of the Kumon Workbooks two years ago and we just never used them.  I love that I can pull these out now and let them use them again.

This week we also started talking about Thanksgiving.  The weather is turning colder so this week I used Friday afternoon to my advantage and did some Turkey fun with the boys.

We did two different projects.  First, we did a color by number Turkey that I found over at Kindercraze.  I love that it printed as half sheets so that it wasn't too much for little hands to color.  This is the first time ever that the boys have actually been willing to follow the directions HA!  Usually they are monochromatic colorer's so seeing them actually color by the number was awesome!  Second, we did a cut and color turkey.  The pattern came from Thanksgiving Activities for Kids - you just need to click the image and save it, then I used my copier to actually enlarge it to 81/2 x 11.  The boys did great getting their pieces colored, cut out, and glued together.

I didn't take any photos but we also worked out side and did some science.  Earlier in our school year, we read a Zootles Magazine about plants and specifically talked about tulip bulbs.  Our local store had all of their bulbs at 75% off recently so I picked up two bags of tulip bulbs - 30 in each bag.  After burning attempting to burn leaves and other flower cuttings (who knew it was so hard to burn leaves???) we worked on planting the bulbs.  They boys may or may not have planted all 60 bulbs in a 2x2 square.  For real.  I'm curious to see what actually comes up in the spring!!