Kindergarten at Christmas Break

We've mainly worked in Five in a Row this semester, which I love.  We've done several fun books: Lentil, Cranberry Thanksgiving, and Ping to name a few.  Ellie is reading quite a few sounds, as we've passed the half way point in the Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.  Her handwriting has grown by leaps and bounds, having started the year only able to write the letters "ElliE."  She still gets frustrated in trying to make things fit on those primary writing lines, but she has gained a great deal of skill.

I did find that the Miquon Orange book I picked up was not quite where she was yet.  The first several pages were a great fit, but it quickly switched to written numbers, assuming that had been taught previously.  While Ellie could count, we hadn't taught her to read and write numbers.  (My stance is that school begins early enough, so we don't do 'preschool,' beyond reading with the kids.)  So we backed up a bit.  We've been working on a dot to dot book, which starts with 1-10 and a chart at the top, so she can be sure to be getting them in order, and moves up to 1-20 as well as a Kumon book for numbers 1-30.

This last week, we've worked on geography...from planet Earth to our particular house.  Here is our gal, with her work.

House→Street→City→State→Country→Continent→Planet

 Excuse my blotting skills, but I don't exactly want to give out our address!

Merry Christmas!

Kristy

Madeline Lapbook

Last week Gabriella and I took our first foray into making a lapbook.  There are absolutely amazing ones out there.  Ours...well it is a first attempt.

The cover has a coloring sheet I printed of a cartoon of Madeline, a tag I created with the title and author, and then a photo of Gabby's favorite piece of architecture from the book (Palais Garnier).

Inside I created a place to match some of the rhyming words that were found in the book.  We also have a page that is dedicated to the number 12--a coloring page of the girls in 2 straight lines, under that flap 12 circles (traced pennies) in two straight lines.  The math problems are 2x6 with the answer below the flap and the same for 'A dozen.'

The back is the map and flag.

Like I said, there are some absolutely fantastic lapbooks out there, and this isn't going to win any awards, but it was a fun way for Gabby to learn and Kate is jealous she didn't get to make one, which generally means that the idea was fun. 

We also ate a meal of French food: quiche, ratatouille, and crepes.

The images:
Madeline coloring sheets
Map of France (Europe) and flag
Palais Garnier (listed as free to share)
The matching sheet was self created using Microsoft