Weekly Report 6-10

School has been chugging right along. I fell off on my weekly reports when our computer was down. Please bear with me as I catch up. We've really been enjoying our studies, and I thank Allah (God) I see so much progress.

Quran/Islamic Studies

We have continued our Prophet study. Over the past few weeks, we discussed and acted out the stories of Hud, Saleh, Abraham, Lot, Issac, Ishmael, Jacob, and Joseph. Most of this was review, but this time we were able to talk more about the deeper meaning of these narratives. We had so much fun acting out the stories.

I have pictures to post later.

Penmanship

Still going here. Yasina is showing some progress, and Amir is still doing well with his copywork.
I've doing some research on lefties and have a some ways to help Yasina such as making sure she does not have to write over the binding of notebooks and showing her how to space her letters.

Phonics

We are almost done with Explode the Code books 1 and 2 for Amir and Yasina respectively. I've already placed the order for books 3 and 4. Amir will be moving on to book 2 and Yasina book 3.

Grammer

I found I was a little too ambitious in this area for our first term. We went through nouns and verbs fairly quickly, and I really thought they had a fair understanding. Well, when we went to cover adjectives and adverb, I would ask them to name a noun so we could brainstrom adjectives to describe it. They couldn't name one. Red Flag! Halt! So this term has been devoted to nouns and verbs exclusively. Next term we will move on to adjectives and adverbs.

Spelling

Spelling has been very successful. Chocolate pudding is the medium of choose for practicing words.

Math
This is the area I'm seeing the most progress in along with reading. We've create a Number Sense Routine for our daily math lesson:

Counting to 100
Mr. Greedy Mouth (Greater/Less Than problems)
What's Missing? (ie 45,__,47)
Place Value Practice
Skip Counting using our Number Snakes

Then we practice our Addition Facts.

Science

We completed our study of the Earth's biomes or ecosystems. We are currently studying the weather with a special emphasis on natural diasters.

Geography

We're in Brazil!

Circle time

I finally figured out what the problem was with vocabulary. Instead of using a random word list, I'm going to now pull words from what we are currently studying. I think if the words are more relevant it will be easier to incoporate them into our daily speech thus making them stick in our little brains!

Spanish

Although we still watch Dora, we gotten back to using our tape program. Yay.

Fine Arts

We are currently studying Ms. Sarah Vaughn and Mr. Alvin Ailey