Reading

We continue to use lots of books from the library. I'm going through the Kindergarten supplementary books on the Seton Home Study webpage. And I'm teaching her to read using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. We're about half way through. We only do it when she asks for it.

Social Studies

Today we played Candy Land with NO RULES. It wasn't any fun. Then we played it with the rules, and it was great. We did this to introduce the concept of law. We talked about laws she is familiar with - I drew pictures of a stop sign, speed limit sign, and stop light, and we talked about what would happen if people didn't follow those laws. Then we talked about the 10 Commandments. We went over the 3 branches of our government in a representational democracy, and then talked about dictatorships with good dictators and bad dictators. In the kingdom of God, God is the one and only ruler - a supremely good dictator. Our country is the USA, and it is a rep democracy. We talked about how we have reps at a state and national level, and worked our Melissa and Doug state map to draw her connections between state government and something she is already familiar with - states. Did we really do all of that??? Seems like a lot for a 4 year old when I write it out, but she seemed to really follow it.

Science: Botany

I'm using the curriculum standards from Core Knowledge (http://www.coreknowledge.org/) and the NJ Dept of Education Core Curriculum Standards.

We've been growing beans and seeds and doing simple plant experiments, like putting a carrot in water and seeing what happens. We put kidney beans in damp tissue paper wrapped in foil, one or two a day over the course of a week. Then we unwrapped them and arranged them in order of least to most developed, talking about germination. We did some experiments with this. Like, with some beans we tried using too much water - she thought it was fun to use too much water, but then when she smelled the saw the rotting bean she decided not to do that. She designed her own experiment - putting pine needles in a bucket of water to see if they would turn green. The experiment was successful - she learned that they will not turn green through water alone. She also helped improve on the carrot experiment.