Friday, June 14, 2013

Weeks 5 & 6, Term 2, 2013

We're over half way!  Yay!

Here is Big Brother with the last of his medals from the World Education Games - 8th = in the world for Science

The last two weeks have been quite productive - everything is ticking along nicely and we're on track for most of our goals for the term.  Preparations are well underway for the Speech and Drama competitions in July, and Big Brother is working hard on his music for his exam at the end of the year.  Covered this week:
Maths - geometry including protractors and compass, Life of Fred (Liver) and other stuff
Grammar - review of nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs
Writing - Haiku, creative writing class and story telling at home
Reading - working on inference and figurative language
Spelling - topic words (such as "syllable" and "museum")
Languages - Song School Latin, German class and French and Spanish online (I don't know how he keeps them all straight)
Art - we're working on building confidence and just having a pencil in hand and having fun

We had a wonderful museum class visit to learn about NZ Native and Endemic birds, and a fantastic Science Alive lesson where he made a working nightlight while learning about circuits.

Little Sister is changing and learning every day at the moment and seems to be growing up very fast.  
She invented this game - apparently this is a machine that changes fours (from 4 to 3&1 and 2&2).


She is joining in more and more on school days and has even come up with some creative projects of her own, including this "kite" (she's made a few more now... complete with singing "let's go fly a kite")  
She still spends most of her time in costume and is getting pretty good at this reading thing now. 


Big Brother and Little Sister are both loving their Song School Latin, and are learning lots.  



We were also very luck to pick up a piano this week.  Both kids are loving learning about it, and the difference in Big Brother's playing has been almost immediate.  He says he can "feel" the difference in the volumes now.  


Sunday, June 2, 2013

Week 4, term 2 2013

Week 4, and another week of interesting discoveries and adventures.

We started the week with a surprise trip to Disney on Ice.
Prince Charming and Snow White were very excited :-)


The rest of the week has been the usual... maths, art, French, German.  We didn't manage our Latin lesson this week - perhaps we'll do two next week.  

Highlight of the week has been exploring dominant / recessive genes and breeding monsters :-)