2nd 2020Quarter Wrap Up:Mouse 4th Grade
Mouse summed it up best this quarter by saying at one point “The best part about finishing a book is getting to start another one”. She has been enjoying the read alouds this quarter and how they tie into what we talk about in history. She gets excited when the readers mention someone we have talked about or someone she “knows”. This quarter I have read aloud to her The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Sign of the Beaver, Johnny Terramin, and we are partially through Tolliver the Spy. With history we have worked through Colonization of America, Quakers, the beginning of Plantations and Slavery Building the American Colonies, The French and Indian War and we ended with the build up to the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. We finished our goal of being at week 18 of Sonlight’s Core D for the end of this quarter by about a week and a half. With the add in of the Lap Book from Sonlight she has added to her understanding of what is going on in history.
We have spent most of this quarter working on Double Digit Multiplication with Regrouping, or so it seemed. Finally, at the end of May it clicked, and we have progressed to Multiple Digit Multiplication with re-grouping, Finding Factors, and Place Value through Millions. I am grateful to have chosen a mastery approach to math, as I think it would have crushed her to have moved on when she was not ready to. Without any other hang foreseeable hang-ups, she should finish this level (Gamma) by the end of next quarter if not before.
Long before we chose Sonlight as our core curriculum, I wanted to include the American Girls Book Series into our school curriculum. I decided that even though Sonlight already offers so many great readers, we would still add these in where appropriate. At the beginning of this quarter Mouse read her first series Kaya and completed a lapbook along side of it. She absolutely loved these books and the lapbook. At the end of this quarter she has begun her second set and is reading the Felicity series and completing a lapbook along with it as well. She picked back up with the Sonlight readers and has read The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, The Courage of Sara Noble, The Secrets of the Sealed Room, Skipback School, and then What Paul Revere, Phoebe the Spy, and Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia. We have been sailing right along with spelling and writing as well. In Spelling we worked on Contractions, Homophones, which allowed us to finish Level 3 mid-April. We picked right up with Level 4 and learned about the sounds tch/ch, dge, ways to spell j, prefixes, the four sounds of y, the er of works and have ended the quarter learning how to spell the months of the year. For IEW we have worked through lessons 5-9. She has learned about writing narratives and writing stories based on the story sequence chart. She is adding who/which clauses, -ly adverbs, quality adjectives because classes and the use of prepositions.
We were able to get the go-cart her Papaw rebuilt for her up and going the rest of the way this quarter and she has taken us all for a ride, and has enjoyed finding a comfort level with driving it around the grounds we are staying at.
