And We’re Done!

Hailey’s last day of 4th grade. How is it possible she’ll be in the 5th grade in the fall??
“When I grow up I want to be a dancer, actress, and artist.”

Hunter’s last day or pre-k. I can’t believe he’ll be in kindergarten in the fall.
“When I grow up I want to be a coffee man.”

Harper on her last day of Tot School… until September when she gets to do Tot School again.

100th Day of School Art

We had our 100th day of school quite a while ago, back in February. But I am going through my folders and posting things that I have not posted yet and this just happened to be one of the things I need to post.

We did a bunch of super fun activities for the 100th day of school.  One of them was this art project.

Hailey had to draw 100 lines and then color them in.  Very simple.  It kept her busy for quite a while and turned out really nice!

Close up of the drawing

American History and Geography

It’s been a while since I posted about what Hailey has been up to.  And these pictures are actually from quite a while ago.  Anyway, as I always say- it’s time to catch up on my posts!  Maybe this summer I really will get caught up.

 Hailey has been studying US Geography this year.  She started out using Road Trip USA but we have changed curriculum since then.

 Hailey was working on part of the lapbook for Road Trip USA.  We both really enjoyed the curriculum, but we stopped using it because it was a bit more involved than what I wanted to use right now.

We have been studying US History this year and Hailey has completed a lot of fun projects to go along with our lessons.

 She learned about Jamestown and built this model of what it was like.  A group of men, boys, and sailors came from England and founded Jamestown- named after King James I.  They built Fort James in a triangular shape.  There were houses, a church, and a storehouse which were all protected by wooden walls.  In time they learned how to plant crops and hunt game in the woods.  As the settlement grew there were houses built outside the fort walls.  (The model is from Easy Make & Learn Projects Colonial America.)

Hailey also learned what a typical colonial village was like.  She drew a picture of what she thought represented a colonial village.

On the back of her drawing she glued this information about colonial villages.  (Colonial Village activity is from History Pockets Colonial Life)

I have lots more fun history activities coming up to share, so be sure to check back!

Essential Skills Advantage Review

It’s that time of year again!  Well, at least for me it is.  At this time of year I always start thinking about what curriculum I want to use next year.  I think about whether or not I want to change what we’re using.  Or, if things are working well then I will probably decide to keep it the same.  We were recently given the chance to try out the Complete Home Learning Suite from Essential Skills Advantage and I thought it would be fun to try it out and see if it something that would work for us. Essential Skills Advantage is an online program for children in grades kindergarten through 6th grade.  ESA offers the following programs:

• Reading for children in grades K-6
• Spelling for children in grades K-6
• Language and Grammar for children in grades 3-6
• Math for children in grades K-6
• Science for children in grades K-3
• Geography for children in grades 3-5

Within all of those programs there are over 14,000 interactive learning activities that were created to be fun and engaging.  When skills are mastered your child can move on to the next set of activities.  As a parent you are able to look at your child’s progress and see how well he or she is performing on the activities that a he or she has completed.  Under your parent account you can also have more than one student, so it is easy to manage all of your children in one place.

Once you set up your account and sign in you will see your classroom page.  I only signed Hailey up for ESA, so she is the only student in my class.  On this page, you click on the name of the student to see the subjects available to your child.

The next page you come to will have the subjects you can pick from.  Just for fun, to show how this all works, I picked “Language Arts and Grammar.”

From there you pick the grade level you want to use.  You can choose any grade level, so if your child needs extra help you can pick a lower grade level.  Or if it’s a subject your child is advanced in, you can pick a higher grade level.  Hailey is in 4th grade, so I picked 4th grade.

Within “Language and Grammar” you will find these subtopics to pick from.  I clicked on “Grammar.”

Once on this screen there are several different choices- they did not all fit on the screen, but this is what a portion of the choices looks like.  So, here you pick what you want your child to work on.  This is where the actual activity will start.

Depending on what subject your child is working on, the activities will look like the above examples.

So, how did we use ESA?  My original plan was to use ESA with Hailey (4th grade).  We have been studying US Geography this year, so she tried out the geography lessons.

In this activity she had to match the state names with the correct states.

A closer look at the screen she was using- the state was highlighted and she had to find the correct name of the state.  She loved doing this!  She tried out several other areas of ESA, but the geography portion was definitely her favorite!

Once we had the program and I had a chance to look through everything there was to offer I knew Hunter (age 4) would love it!

We started out working together on some of the kindergarten activities.  Soon he was ready to do the work all by himself.  And of course, Harper had to think she was doing school work too 🙂

He really liked the picture vocabulary!

He also really enjoyed math.  I think he was pretty proud of himself that he was doing work on my laptop while Hailey was at the other end of the table doing work on her laptop.

Essential Skills Advantage is full of great activities to supplement what your child is learning.  I would not use it as a full curriculum, but in addition to other curriculum ESA offers great activities to reinforce what your child is learning and ensure success in their classes.

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