Bears, Blueberries and Bananas: Letter B Week

We decided to focus on bears this week while studying the letter B. We read lots of great books, some you can see in the middle picture below. I found some great resources on homeschoolshare's site for the book We're Going on a Bear Hunt. Sawyer loved watching the youtube of the author telling the story. 

The pictures above include templates from the lapbook and below are the story cards for Bear Hunt as well as the bear cards from the animal classification cards.  As you can see from the pictures his Lego minfig came along for the lesson. He's mysteriously missing his head...must have gotten too close to the bears.

Of course we made Banana Pudding, or Puddy as Sawyer refers to it. I used my grandma's handwritten recipe for the first time and had to tweak it just a little. Grandma put in the good stuff--condensed milk. Yum.

Both children had great fun making it but even more fun eating it.

I am contemplating some changes with Riley's materials, particularly math and language arts, but I'll post more on that later. This week was a hard one for the two of us, but for attitude reasons, not curriculum ones. Just like when Monday sometimes comes later in the week, sometimes the angst of returning to school after a long break shows up not in the first week back, but the week after. We made it through, though. I decided that starting next week I will be giving her a detailed list of everything that is to be completed each day. 

I am hoping this will give her some ownership in her day as she checks off items when she completes them. I'm also hoping that seeing all she has to do for the day will help her to move through the subjects a little faster, instead of dawdling. She is doing very well, though, and I was particularly impressed this week with how her writing has improved. We are using Writing Tales 1, and I am very pleased with this material. It is easy to teach, and she really enjoys it. It provides the structure she needs while still allowing for creativity. Her retelling for last week was her longest one yet, but the errors were her fewest yet. She had fun working on her final draft this week and adding in a few personal touches to the story.