Week 2: Lesson Plans

Well week 2 went a little differently than week 1. Lucy's already beginning to resist a little, so I had to scale it back and attempt to make it more fun. Ha. Instead of sticking to my rigid day by day plan, I looked at my whole week's worth of lessons/activities I wanted to accomplish and picked the ones I thought she would respond to best each day. So instead of sharing what we did each day (because I don't think I remember), I'm going to tell you what we did for each subject this week.

Letter of the Week: Uu (only the short sound)
Number of the Week: 2
Sight Words of the Week: up, is, said
Verse of the Week: "Glory to God in the highest heaven." (Luke 2:14a)

Bible Lesson
We read the story of the angels and the shepherds in our Jesus Storybook Bible and made a bead angel to go with it. We incorporated a tiny bit of math into building our angel by counting the beads. Lucy amazes me with her natural grasp of math. I told her she needed 24 beads. She got to 20 and said "only 4 more." I know that seems obvious to us as adults, but I don't think it's that common for kids her age. And I can't take any credit for teaching her. It is definitely innate in her. Haha. You can read about the whole lesson here.

Literature
We did a fun literature unit based on the letter "u" this week, all about Disney's "Up." We read a few books, did a fun craft, then watched the movie together as a family. (Arguably the saddest Disney movie ever. Although The Fox and the Hound is a close runner up.) 

Math
Other than the little bit of counting we did during the Bible lesson, and one worksheet about the number 2, the only other thing we did was this umbrella correspondence craft:

This is something else that comes naturally to Lucy. I've never really stressed number to object correspondence. It just makes sense to her. This project was way too easy for her and she breezed through it.

Alphabet Activities
Lucy did one "u" worksheet and one alphabet activity.

I bought a bag of beans from Meijer for $4.99, dumped them in a bin, and hid the puzzle pieces among them. Then I gave Lucy a large slotted spoon and had her go to town finding the letters and putting them back in the puzzle. She did about 20 of the letters, then decided she wanted to make maracas out of the beads. Haha. Good enough.

Sight Word Activities
We did our worksheets, word-a-pillar, and a fun game.

At first, I intended only to do up this week and review the and and from last week. But Lucy insisted that she knew the and and and wanted to move on. I made sure to review all of last week's a fair amount in addition to learning the new ones. I also learned an important lesson. I can't just point to the words, say them, and expect her to know what I'm saying. Every time I pointed to and earlier this week she said "an." I finally realized she didn't know what I was saying, and in a "duh" moment, decided I should put each word in a sentence for her. We did said this week, so I would say something like "Junie B. Jones said, "That bus is stinky and I'm not getting on it!'" (She's much more apt to respond and remember when I use a character she knows and a sentence that makes her giggle. Although I was careful to use different sentences all week so she doesn't see the word "said" and say "stinky!") I also really tried to point out sight words in the books we read this week, but she gets annoyed with that quickly. Haha.

Challenges
I was surprised that Lucy's already starting to whine about doing school. It's only week 2! My biggest frustration/question with homeschooling is how much should I push her? Seriously. She's 4 years old. It is not a big deal for her to really be learning something every day. I know that kids her age learn best through play, and it's not necessary for me to push the worksheets and "sit-down-learning." Buuuuut, at the same time, she has to understand that obeying me is not optional. And when she goes to real school next year, she has to do what the teacher says when the teacher says it. She doesn't get to say "No, I don't want to do this." For the most part, I laid off a little on the bookwork this week. I really want her to do handwriting, and improve writing her lowercase letters. I'm worried that she doesn't know how to write them correctly on the lines. I worry that if she was going to real school, she'd be working on that, and will be behind if I send her to kindergarten not knowing it. But this week, I only made her do one worksheet for letter "u" and one for number 2, in addition to the sight word worksheets. I did this mostly through bribery. Lol. "If you finish this worksheet, you can have mac n' cheese for lunch." Or Frozen stickers or a TV show. Not sure that's the best approach, but it seems to be working. I'm open to other input! :-)