More Learing, More Fun! Week 2!

Week two of our adventures has been filled with more learning and fun this past week! We learned all about Christopher Columbus and his travels to the New World. We have started using our September Center and our file folder games. Lots and lots of books have passed through our hands including a gem that I found at the library this week titled Miss Dorothy and Her Bookmobile. For those of you with children on the spectrum, I am sure that you can relate when I say that no week is perfect and we all have our struggles. But all-in-all, I would say that this week was another success.

I found a neat item to add to (C)'s sensory box this week called "Tangle". I keep it at the table for him to mess with when I am going over concepts or reading aloud. It seems to help him focus a little bit better and not fidget quite so much. He seems to like it better than the squishy balls. I like to have a variety of options for him during the day to change things up a bit.

(C) learned from reading in his Discoverer's Bible that the name "Jesus" means that "the Lord saves". What a wonderful name!

In spelling, (C) remembered all three sounds of the letter "A". What success! He spelled out his spelling words with stamps that I purchased from Melissa and Doug. Mama Jenn has some sheets on her site called "read it, spell it, write it". I had him use those with his stamps.

We learned all about Christopher Columbus and his travels to the new world.Did you know that he never knew that he didn't make it to the Indies? What an exciting story of exploration! We marked our time-line and read the Stephen Krensky version of Christopher Columbus . We also watched the DVD from Nest Videos titled "Christopher Columbus". Finally, we made an interactive 3-D map of the travels of Christopher Columbus that I got from the book, Interactive 3-D Maps: American History.  On Friday, we sailed aluminum foil boats across the Atlantic Ocean (a.k.a bath tub) to show how boats needed wind power to sail.

Our poor little butterflies that we have had since they were caterpillars really wanted out. So we released them today. It was a bittersweet moment. We have enjoyed watching them. But it was time to set them free.

After math and grammar, we got the fun stuff out and made a 3-D diorama of landforms. I got the idea from The Crafty Classroom. I found some brown clay to make the project a bit easier. (C) and I had a great time together!

(C) is memorizing a poem for First Language Lessons for the Well Trained Mind. In an effort to make it easier, for for him, I wrote out the poem on sentence cards and then cut out each word individually and put them in a pocket chart. After we read the poem a couple times together, I turn over some words so that he has to fill them in by memory as we read it. I turn over more words each time. This method is working out well.

While spending some time in Pintrest today (ok... traveling the time-warp), I found a great blog that had some wonderful ideas for using Duplo blocks. You have to check this out. So simple yet great! She uses Duplo blocks for spelling and making sentences. Her blog is called "Filth Wizardry".

Things are getting a bit messy in my closets already. Time to organize this creative mess! :