Weekly Report 1

This week was great! The children were excited and enthusiatic. I've been ready to start weeks ago, but I wanted to stick to my plan. Here's the play by play. . .

Quran/Islamic Studies
Continued Memorization Work including Surah 103, The Time
Discussed Adam and acted out stories

Math
Still waiting on our Math U See Alpha book, so we reviewed topics from Primer that I know we'll do in Alpha. This week we reviewed Place Value, Adding units (ones), tens and hundreds. I personally love the way MUS teaches place value. It's fun and brings a really abstract concept right down to a young child's concrete way of thinking. Both children are really doing well here.

Penmanship
Surah 103
Amir really excels here. He did a great job. Yasina, not so much. Next week, I'm putting the copywork book on hold for her and going back to formation, letter by letter. I just figured out she was a leftie this summer, so I know that has a lot to do with why her handwriting is straight up terrible. Ya'll, it is really bad! I'm thinking of ordering Handwriting Without Tears, but I'm going to see how she is doing after some intense one-on-one first.

Phonics
Explode the Code is going great. Yasina is in Book 2 working on beginning blends bl, gl, and fl. Amir is in Book 1 doing short a.
Typical boy, we ran into some trouble this summer with blending words. He can read, but it is labor. We went back to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 EZ Lessons for him. We started with this and it was working well. Then at about Lesson 37 or so, I thought we had it, so I quit. Bad Mama! So we started from the beginning, he knows the sounds, it's just something about putting them together that is just hard for him. We did have a major breakthrough this week, he read a Level 1 reader by himself! It took two hours, but he did it. LOL! Just kidding!

Yasina is a Reading Rockstar! She flying through books these days, doing beautifully in this area.

If you have beginning readers or just started down the path, I can't recommend Leapfrog Letter/Word Factory videos and Starfall.com enough. These are two great resources for learning to read that we used. I'm also feeling the Montessori method of teaching as well. I'm sure I'll be posting it for Hassana in the next few months but Barbara Curtis has a nice plan in her book, Mommy, Teach Me to Read.

(Most of the following, I'll be posting more later.)

Spelling
This week's words an, and, can, ran. Both children did really good.

Grammer
We began discussing nouns this week.

Circle Time
Vocabulary Words were shady, relieved, pucker, sight, and whistle.

Our root word was OCT meaning number 8.

Science
We began a study of biomes, starting with deserts.

Geography
Reviewed continents and oceans

Spanish
Hola!/What is your name?/My name is . . .
Spanish numbers 0-10

Fine Arts
Our artists this month are Mr. Gordon Parks and Ms. Ethel Waters.