Plans for June

Yes I know we are already into June and it is a tad bit late to post about plans for the month. But I am going to anyway. We took last week "off" of unit studies for a little break after the ocean unit and to plan for the summer. We will be doing school stuff through the summer but only in the morning. After lunch is free summer kid stuff!

This is what our days will look like until September.

Start with daily warm ups (as usual) - getting the weather report and recording it on her calendar, writing in her journal, reviewing spelling and vocabulary words, and documenting the progress of her sunflower garden.

Ms. Q will continue to work in her grammar and phonics workbooks. She loves doing workbook pages but I have found some new websites with free games that she will totally love doing more than workbooks.

Both of us hate her math workbook and we actually stopped using it about a month ago anyway. So there will not be any math workbook stuff. We have partially switched to living math with manipulatives and math games and it is really much more fun. The last board game I made up about clocks she asked to play even when it wasn't "school time," so I know she enjoyed it. I do supplement these activities with free worksheets I find online, but again, she likes the worksheets. I think we will use some math online games too. I don't plan to introduce any new math concepts during the summer, just reinforce what she learned this year.

Instead of our usual unit study we decided on theme weeks for the summer. Each theme will last only for that week and will hopefully cover most of the subject areas.

Here is what the schedule looks like for the rest of June:
June 11-14 America Week!
June 18-21 Ms. Q's Birthday Week!
June 25-28 Sports Week!

We just started America Week today, so I will write another post with the plans for the week but we have some other fun stuff for the summer too.

New for the summer are Nature Walk Thursdays! Every even week we will take Thursday to spend at a park or other outdoor space. Ms. Q made up a nature journal to take along and we will be creating a hiking pack with necessary supplies like binoculars, plastic bags, a ruler, magnifying glass, camera, pencils, and crayons. Using her four senses (we left out the sense of taste for safety and grossness) she will record what ever she wants any way she wants about the day.

Also new is our goal of reading one hundred books during the summer! This was sparked by a reading list I found on the New York Public Library's website called 100 picture books everyone should know. These are some of the best children's books ever! Some of the books Q has already read or didn't interest her so we are using the booklist as a guide and adding our own. We are recording our progress on the livingroom wall with a giant bee hive. After we read a book it's name is written on a bumble bee that Q colors and adds to the wall. So far so good!

Well that's it for now but rest assured that the adventures continue.