We are stating light with a unit study on Little House in the Big Woods and a quick study of our maple tree out back that is having some trouble. We only did 6 workboxes today so we could have our sunny day (one of our VERY few this summer) set aside for cabin building (we are making a playhouse!!). I figured we would learn as much from putting the siding on our playhouse than we would from sitting inside doing worksheets. 
I am substituting my reading aloud for audio books right now to get in the groove of schooling again, and it’s working out beautifully. I will get back to having my school read-aloud time with them in a few weeks, but for now we are really enjoying Audiobooks. Today, we listened to the first two chapters of “Little House in the Big Woods” narrated by Cherry Jones. If you haven’t heard this version, I highly suggest it! She does such a wonderful job! She has a husky tenor voice that it easily believable as Ma, Pa, or any of the children. She does the singing and the fiddle music playing behind the story is just lovely.
We were all enthralled. 
After the chapters for today were complete, we started the Little House in the Big Woods lapbook, starting with the cover pages, the smoke house, and the log cabin on the back.
Next up was nature study. I had marked the page in Fun with Nature Trees, Leaves, and Bark to the page that had the maple tree on it and I sent Logan out back to discover which tree was the Maple. It only took him a few minutes to come back in with a maple leaf! I went out with him and we looked at the pictures and compared the maple tree in the book to our maple in the yard. We came back in with a few leaves and spent some time making leaf rubbings for our Nature Notebooks.
We did two on top of each other with different colors so you could see the different sizes of the leaves on the tree right now… then we marked the date and wrote down the words ‘Maple Tree’ on the page.
Next up was a Montessori activity called “Animal Farm”. Since Logan is reading 3 and 4 letter words pretty well now I just let him do the whole thing by himself.
The only one he needed help with was “Lamb” (of course) because he was trying to find ‘sheep’.
After this we worked on Logan’s sight words while Cyan worked on her spelling list. He is having a little trouble with blends and digraphs so I pulled out the ones that are in the first two lists of the Dolch Words chart and we worked on those for a few minutes.
Then I moved over to Cyan as Logan played with the counting manipulitives in the next workbox.
She is doing spelling words from a note she wrote back in may where she misspelled them. I had her write them correctly twice and then practice them out loud, then we did the test. She only missed two, but she wrote those out 5 times while saying them aloud at the same time. We will use this same list for the whole school week.
Logan’s last box for today was number recognition. This was something he was really having trouble with when we started our break. He doesn’t seem to have any issue now. Even so, I made it so that he was using stickers instead of having to remember the number, remember what it looked like, and then trying to recreate that with his 5 year old fingers at the same time. lol! Next time I will add in him writing them, because it seemed that this was super easy and went very quickly. But he enjoyed the success!
Kindergarten and 6th grade have begun!
