Once again, this is NOT really our first week of homeschooling. Not by a long shot. But it's the first week since Monkey turned 7 and had to be officially schooled. So let's pretend it is our first week.
Remember our schedule for this week? We pretty much stuck with it except for the extras like the Math Circle, fencing, and the Young Engineers Club. That's because we had a snow and ice storm and everything else got cancelled. We're just happy we've made it to yoga this week. But we did make up for it by going sledding and walking around in the snow. And the Young Engineers club... Well, Monkey got to watch Denise the Menace and ended up working on making traps.
So here's what we actually did this week:
| Week of | English Reading | Math |
| February 10-14, 2014 | ||
| Monday | Let's Read - Lesson 50 pg 140 Explode the Code - pg 50-51 | Funny arithmetic Kangaroo 2012 |
| Tuesday | Let's Read - Lesson 50 pg 141 Explode the Code pg 52 | Yatzee, SpotIt Kangaroo 2012 Flow app, Bloxorz app |
| Wednesday | Let's Read - Lesson 51 Explode the Code pg 53-54 | IQ Fit, SpotIt Kangaroo 2012 Living Math book - The Mystery of the Sunken Treasure |
| Thursday | Let's Read - Lesson 52 Explode the Code pg 55-56 | Living Math book - The Mystery of the Sunken Treasure Kangaroo 2012 |
| Friday | Let's Read - Lesson 53 Explode the Code pg 58-59 | Kangaroo 2012 Tuna Wiggle (from The Mystery of the Sunken Treasure) KenKen |
That's pretty close to plan. Some time this weekend I'm going to post a list of books/curriculum we use on a separate page somewhere here. In the mean time, a few notes on math.
Funny Arithmetic is a Russian book we have. It's full of word problems and most of them are hilarious (to kids at least). Here's an example:
Pyotr Petrovich came for advice to Masha's Dad and had to take his shoes off at the door. As soon as the three-year-old Masha saw Pyotr Petrovich's shoes, she promptly put 6 spoon fulls of cream of wheat in each. How many spoon fulls of cream of wheat did Pyotr Petrovich discover in his shoes after he received helpful advice from Masha's Dad?
There are also problems about rotten eggs, rotten tomatoes, hamburgers thrown from a window, broken toys, kids eaten by dragons, angry janitors, and, of course, about parents and grandparents.
Math Kangaroo is an annual competition. We don't plan on entering it, but the problem sets are a good practice, particularly the ones that rely less on arithmetic and more on problem-solving skills. You can find problem sets from previous years online. Monkey usually does a couple of problems at a time from the 3-point and 4-point categories.
The Mystery of the Sunken Treasure - it's a math adventure book we found at a local thrift shop. It's an out of print book, but available used on Amazon (in case your local thrift shop is not as awesome as ours). There is a fair share of arithmetic there (like the Wiggly Tuna game we played today where a player rolls a pair of dice, doubles one of them and adds another to the result to catch numbered tuna fish). But there are also sets, patterns, tessellations, symmetry, graphs, exponentiation, and a story about a boy who tricked the evil guard, told with pictures made out of tangram shapes.
Monkey also got to play a few math apps - Bloxorz (also available for play online here), Flow (also available online for free here), and KenKen (lots of online options for it). KenKen seems like a mental arithmetic game, but it's really a logic game. For now Monkey stays in the 4x4 space with only 4 numbers - 1, 2, 3, 4 - and addition only. But seeing how he was just fine with mental math as we played Tuna Wiggle, I think he'll be just fine in the more difficult levels of KenKen.
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