What Have We Done This Week?

I was reading another blog I follow and the Mom posts each week what the kids did for school that week. I thought that that was a great idea as it helps you realize that yes, you really did accomplish a lot. So... we'll see if I can follow through with it.
This week was a difficult week for school for two reasons. Paul had Monday and Tuesday off for vacation and Daniel had ear infections. Monday (because we spent several hours in the E.R. as well as on Thursday) I don't think anything got done other than my reading books to them. We started reading a marvelous book called Paddle to the Sea by ? C. Holling. I can't remember his first name at the moment. But it's about a canoe that this little boy carves and puts in the snow in Canada as the snow melts the canoe is swept into the stream and the book tells all of the adventures of this boat as it makes its way from snow to stream to sea. We will use this book again next  year to work on some geography as well as some science but for now we are just enjoying reading it.
We also read Ping - a story about a duck who doesn't want to be the last one on the boat as the last one always gets a swat so he hides out instead and the boat sails away without him. He almost gets put in duck soup but a kind boy rescues him. He realizes that sometimes getting a swat is better than what might happen otherwise and returns to his boat with his family.
Yet another one was called Blueberries for Sal. Sal goes picking blueberries with his Mom and Mother bear and baby bear do to. The children end up with the wrong mothers and figure out how to get back. It's an old story but a cute one!
This week I also introduced Poetry to my kids. Daniel was screaming because he didn't want me to read from my books. I read to them Robert Louis Stevenson's  A Child's Book of Verses. I read to them several poems from it and when I went to stop they were begging for more. I  had to laugh. 
Daniel has been working in a Math book right now. I have a different curriculum coming for him as workbook work is really hard for him to sit still and do but it hasn't come yet. We did manage somehow to get through 5 pages anyway this week. He is doing 1st grade work and doing really well. He is currently working on finishing learning to count to 20, (16 and 17 are the problem for him.) and adding and subtracting. He just started working with groups of ten and it was interesting to see how quickly he caught on to the idea that this is a group of ten and you don't have to count them all just know that these are ten and you can start counting at 10. It also helped cement numbers 11-20 for writing as you have this group of 10 and then you have 5 more. You write the 1 from the 10 and then the 5 which also teaches place value. Reagan is working on numbers above 10 slowly...
We try to have Daniel read from his books twice a day but it doesn't always work that way. I think only once this week did we get it in twice but it's the goal and as long as we get it in at least once that's okay. He is currently finishing book number 8 and starting on learning number 9 in a series of 10. He can read short sentences of short vowel words. He's having problems with book 9 right now as it has the Y in it and because the J and Y sound similar he thought that the Y said J like the C and K make the same sounds. So we are working on correcting that. He was excited to get to a letter in his Explode the code book (handwriting) that he already knew- n. That made the writing, which he struggles with, a little easier for the week. Reagan has a hard time learning the sounds or names of letters. She has to write them so we are very slowly learning to write letters and learning what they are and what they say. So far we have done B and F and she knows O. The alphabet for some reason does not come naturally to my kids.
We also went to swimming lessons this week, picked raspberries twice (Yum!), went to therapies for Daniel, and made cookies (which also works on math skills). We went to Daniel's violin lesson and I'm loving his teacher. I chose a Suzuki teacher for him as I felt like he was going to have a hard enough time learning to play right now not having the fine motor skills without having to learn the music too. She is fabulous with him. She comes up with little games to teach him the things he needs to know and varies it frequently so that his muscles which get tired quick have a chance to rest. We are also listening to and learning a little about Mozart. Daniel says he doesn't like his music but oh well.

That's some of what has been keeping us busy at our house!