Halfway through 1st Grade!

<-- Hannah's illustration for A Fly Went By.

We closed out week 18 of our core on Friday (we’re about a week behind in LA and Science at week 17). It’s crazy to think that we’re halfway through. These 6 weeks took a little bit longer in actual time due to the holidays and visits from family and friends, but we’ve still enjoyed them.

Bible – We’re almost done with The Beginner’s Bible which Hannah reads from each day. I’m reading selections from Genesis to both kids at the moment and we’re still working through Leading Little Ones to God. While I don’t agree 100% with every theological statement in this book, it is a very thorough bible based Christianity 101 type book that I’ve found to be very useful in discussing our faith with Hannah.

In history/social studies, we finished up a couple more weeks of ancient Egypt including a fun selection from a book called Usborne Time Traveler (we’ll get to come back to this book later), then a little bit of history of other ancient cultures before we began our study of Ancient Greece and some greek mythology. We continue using Usborne Book of World History and Child’s History of the World as our guide with additions from a magazine-style book called The Greek News and a beautiful little book from Usborne called Greek Myths for Young Children. Hannah has really enjoyed the mythology and has remarked on some things that she was already aware of that come out of this time period.

In read alouds, we completed Henry Huggins and Understood Betsy both of which were quite enjoyable. Understood Betsy started off pretty slow but had me crying at the end. 😉

Reading / LA – Hannah reads so well that I don’t really keep her on the reading schedule in the LA anymore. She has been reading Magic Treehouse, the Tinkerbelle chapter books, and Boxcar children to herself. I just time her for at least 10 min a day to get her Pizza Hut rewards. She also ends up reading her Highlights and Lego magazines to Benjamin.

Science has been a lot of fun. We’ve been working through Usborne World of Animals which takes each continent and explores the predominant or well known habitats there and the animals that live in them. So it has had a little bit of geography thrown in. 🙂 We continue with weekly readings in See How It’s Made and a weekly experiment. We’ve had a bit to do with water lately.

<-- Hannah learned how to make Rainbow Loom bracelets over Christmas break! Hannah continues to dislike math even though she is pretty good at it. I still can't tell if maybe she is bored (it is too easy). She likes to dawdle and doodle all over her page which quite annoys me. Oh well, Ben will be my math man. Extras - We really enjoy our activities with the homeschool group. Monthly book reports, weekly PE/park days/beach hangouts, visits to the botanical gardens, and friends to meet us at Disney when we go. We also did field trips to see the Pompeii exhibit and space shuttle Endeavour at California Science Center, went and checked out our free membership at LA Co Museum of Art, and participated in a homeschool day at the Natural History Museum.