6 Weeks of 1st Grade Done

Wow! Time is just scooting right along. Ben is finishing up his preschool curriculum and Hannah has finished 6 weeks of Core B (1st grade).

For bible, we’ve been actually reading out of the New Testament rather than from a children’s bible. I’m not sure how much we’ll get through this year, but we are almost done with Mark. We have a book called Leading Little Ones to God which is basically a Christianity 101 type book written for children. I am excited to work through this as Hannah has been asking a lot of those type questions and we’ve been discovering the answers together. It is a little bit dated in references to hymns, but the content has been good so far. Hannah’s first read aloud for LA is The Beginner’s Bible so we are also working through that. It is a really fun time of the day when Hannah reads out of it to Benjamin and I. 🙂 She has somewhat memorized a 6 verse section of Psalms, but I haven’t been doing a great job following up on that, so we need to spend a little more time listening to the song and practicing.

In history/social studies, we’ve worked through two fun Usborne reference books, Peoples of the World and Houses and Homes. Both have a ton of details about different cultures, their houses, their money, their religions, etc. It’s been a good review of geography and overall look at the world before we start with ancient civilizations in the next couple of weeks.

For Read Alouds we have finished Charlotte’s Web (and watched the movie) and Homer Price. Great books.

Our spine(s) for language arts this year are the Explode the Code books 4-6. So far we’ve worked through compound words, suffixes, syllables, quotations, and some sentence mechanics. She usually has one creative writing assignment a week and those are getting a little bit longer. I’m not doing a formal handwriting, some assignments Hannah does in cursive and the rest in print.

Science is a lot of fun again this year. Our main unit for the first half of the year is animals and we’re using a couple of great Usborne books. For our labs we’ve been studying magnets and magnetism and doing some simple experiments.

We are doing Horizons 2 for math. Hannah is really good at grasping the concepts, but tends to get easily distracted. So we switched our original schedule around to have math first in the morning instead of writing and if she doesn’t get it finished she loses some of her TV time. That has been helping her focus a bit. 🙂

Extras:
– Disneyland: We purchased annual passes to Disney, they are good until end of May if you wanna come visit us. 🙂 I think we’ve been enough times now to justify the original cost and the rest is just bonus. We plan to go about once a week for a half day as long as we don’t have a field trip with our homeschool group and as long as our school work is getting done.
– We did one field trip to Discovery Science Center with Daddy and a couple play dates with our homeschool group as well as our monthly book report club.