We started a really fun and cute unit on Animals of the World using the book All About Animals of Around the World. We learned about the names and shapes of the 7 continents and now I was to have some fun with habitats and animals.

We discovered Forest Animals this week, and found forest animals to add to our animal wall (we’re using the animals from COAH’s Animals of the World to make this wall). I have the book Beginning Geography, which has a small unit on animals from each continent, so we are using that to tell us which continents have which kinds of habitats. I will also be putting together a Antarctic unit myself, so we can do a week on the beloved Happy Feet penguins. All About Animals Around the World does animals of the Arctic Tundra, but not Antarctica penguins (no ocean animals either). Sad!

We sponged painted trees and put a bee hive in them, and a big bear stealing some honey (this craft came from the fabulous book I mentioned).

I guess Thing One’s hive is falling out of the tree. And he insisted bears were purple. But he also doesn’t like coloring – to is is just a wonder this bear is colored at all! He’s so creative, hahaha.

The Forest animals unit had lots of other fun activities, but they were more Thing Two’s speed, so you’ll have to check out the Tot Adventures post on Forest Animals.

I have to be honest, Thing One was NOT into doing anything this week. Except his math. He really loves his math stuff…a lot. This is great, but I need to find way to make everything else more fun for him. He participate in what I had planned, but he really complained a lot. I discovered he doesn’t like to color (his words – not mine!). Which is a bit disastrous since most activities in the K area have some kind of coloring component to them. But he like to paint – so I guess we’ll just paint instead of use crayons! I really need to work on finding more hands-on (non coloring) activities for him.

We worked on three lowercase letters this week, one was the letter b for Bear, which was neat since we were talking about bears for our Forest Habitat. We painted our art page for the letter b, and I got another wonderful rainbow animal fro12 m Thing One. He even painted a berry tree for his bear – now that was impressive – I didn’t think he would get that into it. I guess paint is a good motivator for him.

The boys played a domino game of the letters m, w, p, d, b, t, and f. They enjoy doing games together. I think I should find more ways to make games out of reading. We have a bare-bones book for reading, which really still like, but it doesn’t seem to be the right fit for us. I think Thing One really needs more stimulation for learning than black and white words on paper.

I have been looking at the PAL Reading Program by Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW), but we can’t swing the price tag at the moment. It is not badly priced (very reasonable in my opinion), but it will still have to wait. Mostly because they recommend All About Spelling in conjunction with their reading program, which is just under $100 and that I know we can’t handle right now! But you don’t have to use AAS, but I am sure it is paired for a reason, and I have heard wonderful things about AAS (and AAR…but IEW seems to have a totally different approach to reading, which after researching seems a better fit for my kid).

Working on his beloved MUS. I don’t have anything negative to say about this curriculum. Worth every penny! We’ll be finished with Primer in August/September and be moving on to Alpha. Sooner, if he had his way….he would do math all day, every day! I sure hoe his enthusiasm lasts. I think this program will ensure it does. I think I would have understood math much better had it been taught this way when I was in grade school. Thing One is reading off random numbers all over the place in the hundreds with ease.