Week 1

We just finished up week one of first grade today.  The week went great and I really like how I have things laid out.  In fact sometimes it feels a little too easy.  It's taken us about 2 hours a day to get our work done which still leaves plenty of time to play outside, clean the house and have fun.  And Phoebe and Hazel have been great too.  Phoebe likes to sit at the table with us sometimes and color in her coloring book and say she's doing school too.

Handwriting
We're doing handwriting without tears again this year.  I've found that John really needs the continued practice or he forgets what he's doing.  I also picked up a dry-erase book of numbers yesterday at Lakeshore Learning because he does all his numbers backwards and is constantly asking me "does it go this way" and makes some weird motion in the air when he asks so I don't even know which way he means when he asks.  He's pretty mad at me for getting yet another book but he definitely needs the practice.

Science
We've only done one chapter in science so far but so far I like it.  It does a good job explaining the concepts on a level the kids can understand but it still uses the proper terms for things.  The kids are now enjoying calling people homo sapiens.

For our science experiment (there's one every week) we described various items and then put them in different groups based on the description.


Geography
I realize now how little I know about all the states myself.  So I'm looking to forward to this year and learning a few new things myself.  The kids are very eager to learn the states and be able to find them on the map.  Also as Lakeshore Learning last night I picked up USA Bingo.  We played today and it was fun.  We stopped and found each state on the map every time I called a new state and then they looked on their bingo cards to see if they had it.





Bella won and John wasn't too happy about that



Phonics
I have heard nothing but good stuff about the Explode the Code workbooks and so far I have to agree that they are great.  John definitely would not have been ready for them last year, and maybe not even Bella so I'm glad I waited until now to start them.  There was a page today where you read two sentences and then pick the one that matches the picture.  John immediately went to saying he couldn't do it because he couldn't read the sentences but had no trouble at all.  At which point I told him "see you're reading!"  He's my "I can't" child and thinks everything is too hard.  If he only had more motivation I'm convinced he'd pass Bella by in no time.  I really hope that someday he'll find that motivation.

Art
We're doing Draw Write Now, I bought the book last year and we did the first picture but then I decided to save it for this year.  So today we redid the first lesson.  Each picture also has sentences to go with it and practice handwriting.  John threw a fit at the end when it was time to write though so he now has homework.  It was his second meltdown this week, I'm hoping that eventually we'll haves weeks without them.