Week of Nov 9

David:

Still needs a lot more practice on 2x2 multiplication.  His mistakes are mostly due to being sloppy, and he confuses himself when the digits are not lined up in the right place.  We briefly started doing area of a triangle as an application of the 2x2 multiplication, and while he's gets the concept down pat, he needs to be more careful when multiplying. We did an experiment cleaning silver jewelry with foil and baking soda, and he filled out a little lab report. 

Jonathan:

Needs more practice in understanding the words that are commonly used in subtraction word problems.  He totally understands the idea of "things going away, and how many is left," but he has not yet understand the idea of using subtraction to find out how many more of one thing than another thing.  He has neater hand writing than David did at the same age.

On the history front, we did the story of The Mayflower and Thanksgiving, and Jonathan was surprised that there was no pie at the first Thanksgiving.

Week of Nov 2

The kids got to decorate the house, watch Halloween themed movies, had bottomless candy for day, and totally bounced off the walls over the weekend.

David is continuing with 2 by 2 multiplication.  His biggest issue is actually being more careful when lining up his digits and checking his work before turning it in. We went over the 5 basic elements of a story using a scene from the old Winnie the Pooh movie where Pooh got stuck at Rabbit's house after eating too much.  We went over the English colonies in New England and the history of the Mayflower.  For science, he watched "The Great Polar Bear Feast" on PBS, where scientists at the USGS talked about how climate change affects the future of polar bears.

Jonathan has moved on to single digit subtraction within 10.  He's getting it but not quite.  He's continuing with writing his letters and numbers more legibly.  He really likes the book "Living Long Ago."  Because Halloween was over the weekend, we went over the origin and history of Halloween.

Today is Friday, so we went out to a local park, and the boys got a solid hour of running and climbing around while pretending to be screaming pirates.  Since most kids were home in the morning with the local public school, they got the whole park to themselves!