the first Friday

Today we did a more relaxed homeschooling approach since all week long we went straight by the books in our chosen curriculum. Since it's Friday we kind of "chilled" and  then we came home and NyGirl sang with her dad as he played some praise and worship music. She then watered her plant (a sunflower which has grown tremendously under her care in the past 2 months

Afterward she worked on a few handwriting worksheets and played some computer games on PBSKids.org.   So in all, today she did Language Arts, Music,Science, and P.E. In science, she's been learning about how soil, sunlight, and water help a plant grow.? Here's her beautiful sunflower which she's been growing for about 2 months now:



Overall, this has been a very successful first week of homeschooling.

Up until today, we've been working vigorously through our Abeka program for Language Arts, the Math-U_See for mathematics, practicing writing a-c lowercase, piano lessons, and learning French... French has been great!

Her father's native language is French so it's a real plus having the "source" around to help us integrate the language into our family life. In the meantime, when he's at work we've been playing a game I like to call the "BonBon Game", where we have several differerent colors of candies (or in French "bonbons" or "les bonbons")...but since we don't keep candy at our house we used colored counting chips instead.

I made flash cards and set out groups of 5 red chips, 4 yellow, 3 green, 2 blue, and 1 orange, for example. The flashcards gave both the names of the colors and the amount in French. I would ask "Je voudrais deux bonbons bleu, s'il vout plait" and she would learn that I am asking for 2 blue candies and would give me what I requested. The other half of the game is when she had to ask me (in French) for the amount and colors of candies she wanted.

In piano, she's learning theory (quarter notes, half notes, whole notes), what a measure or bar is, bass clef and treble clef, and so far is able to recognize the notes C,D, and E on a music sheet. On the piano keyboard she recognizes middle C and all low and high C's. Of course, these are things we've been working on since she was very little, so this didn't all happen this week!!! I plan to make some music flashcards (or buy some, or even print some out if I can find a great free resource) so that she can learn to recognize more of the notes. Anyone knows of a great resource for this?? Let me know!