Week Eight - Review

Your children absolutely amaze me (and Calvin)...I think this is what I love most about my chosen career!

To be honest, when I began thinking about the "study" for this year I knew the children would love learning about different places, people, animals, music & flags from around the world but to learn the individual countries I thought was "stretching it". But, I thought I would put the country names to music (as I've done with most everything else)and see what happened. Your children have proved me wrong - and I'm so glad to say that!

Today, I began by holding up the printed copy of the map of Central America and asked the class if anyone remembered what this map was of.  One of the students (3 1/2 years old) confidently came forward and said, "Yes, Mrs. Kerr, it's Central America.  And here is Guatemala and Belize.  This is El Salvador and here is Honduras.  This is Nicaragua and Costa Rica. This one is Panama."  Yes, I said...what a brilliant girl you are! She replied humbly with "Thanks, that's just what you told us." Who knows, maybe this girl will end up being a world traveller or a cartographer! Calvin & Quaid were home for the afternoon today and she showed this map and told them the countries as well. Calvin honestly said, "Wow, you just taught me something because I didn't know where any of those countries were located on a map!"

They know how to pronounce the names of the countries in North America and recognize them when written! They have been practising printing out each country name and I've been reminding them that only the first letter is capitalized all other letters must be written in the lower case form. It's wonderful to hear them talking about these countries in their free play, being a Monarch travelling over the Great Lakes, through the USA, until they reach the oyamel forests of Mexico! Or the beautiful quetzal bird flying in Guatemala.

We reviewed the sounds of oy, ir, o, and this week I introduced the soft c sound, like in Central America. Words like cent, centre, percent, cent, cylinder, circle, Gracin, race, face. We also reviewed blended sounds like br, dr, tr, cr, gr, squ, st, sm, sp, spl. And we've been practising spelling our first names, both written and orally.

We practised counting to 100, by 1s, 5s, 10s.

I also introduced nine North American animals (Canada & USA) pictures and words to the children. The animals were lynx, moose, racoon, eagle, beaver, mountain goat, chipmunk, monarch, brown bear.


We've felt a little cooped up lately with all the rain - so it was really nice on Wednesday & Thursday to be outside for a good length of time. The children are such keen observers - noting the differences in the deciduous trees in the neighbourhood, most are bare already.

We have only 2 more chapters to read in Tommy Smith's Animals, the Squirrel & the Barn Owl.

Next week, we'll be studying the Caribbean Islands of North America.  Cuba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cayman Islands, The Bahamas, Turks & Caicos, Antigua, The Virgin Islands, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago.  We'll listen to some steel drum music and calypso music!

If you have any items from these places that you'd like to send with your child, please feel free to do so! It's always nice to have something concrete to look at and touch.

We will also be celebrating Amelia Greydanus' birthday - she will be 4 on Sunday, October 28th!