(Week 22): Adventures Week 18

State Studies: Tennessee

We reviewed all of our states up to this point. Alexa is working, simply on identifying and placing where Wisconsin is on the map, while Treyton is reviewing most of the states that he’s learned this year and last.

We added in Tennessee this week. Treyton already knew Tennessee which was nice, while he’s still mastering the older ones.

Eli Whitney: We also learned about Eli Whitney this week.

We placed him on our timeline, I never realized that Eli Whitney lived in/near the time of the Revolutionary war.

Coincidently, a few weeks ago my mom had given me a cotton blossom from my Grandma’s things. It was fully intact, and had seeds in it, which the kids were able to identify easily. 

Because I didn’t want to destroy my own cotton blossom, we went ahead and made our own cotton with cotton swabs and tiny pieces of paper. Treyton loved the challenge of removing the “seeds”, and was really excited about his pile of seeds Alexa however was not as big of a fan… except the cutting the paper part :)

Treyton made a notebooking page for Eli Whitney. All week, the most important thing Treyton thought Eli Whitney did was make nails. :) I kept telling him it was the cotton gin that made us know who Eli Whitney was, but I’m not sure if he ever really got it. ;)

Alexa made one, too – I obviously wrote her narration, and she drew a picture of Whitney.

Read-Alouds:

• “A Band of Angels” by Deborah Hopkins
• “The Inventions of Eli Whitney: by Holly Cefrey

Reading:

Treyton read “Daniel’s Duck” this week on his own. He really enjoyed it, and even told Tim what the book was about. He also read “Eat” – a book about different types of animals and bugs eating styles and strange diets.

Treyton is becoming a more confident reader every week, he has always loved reading to Alexa, but I am noticing him doing it more and more…. not much warms my heart more :)

Math: Subtraction to 100

Treyton strengthened his subtraction skills this week, while working on subtraction up to 100. He was not really understanding my explanation of subtraction on his own, but once he started writing the problems himself he really seemed to “get it” and just took off with it. I am really proud of him and his efforts to understand math so well.