1st 6 Weeks of Core A

Yay, excited to be able to post about Ginny’s schoolwork and show pictures!

The first 6 months or so of having her was spent trying to assess where she was in all the different subjects and try out a few things on her to see what would work the best. We also needed to set expectations and do a little bit on work ethic. We managed to have her and Joel do their book time together for awhile but it ended up working better to separate them. When I decided that, I moved her into Core A for her official 3rd grade year, so we could get a nice shallow overview of all things world history and touch as many subjects as possible. We are 6 weeks in and this seems to be working pretty well. 

Ginny didn’t have much background in bible so at first we spent a good amount of time reading through a preschool bible that I found so she would have at least heard the majority of the main accounts once. When she finished that, and as part of her adoption, we gave her her first bible. She has been learning how to follow along as the others read during devotions in the morning. Then for Core A there is an assigned children’s bible so she’ll get another nice overview as we work through that. She has been working through some memory verses and our church is doing one weekly as well so we’ll keep that up. 

We have The Usborne Children’s Encyclopedia as our main spine. We are also working through Living Long Ago as a way to compare cultures to today. We have a missionary story collection called I Heard Good News Today that we read a selection from each week. We have a daily calendar activity and she fills in the month on the first day so we can add holidays and birthdays to it. 

We started read alouds with The Boxcar Children. She had already listened in on book one so we did 2 and 3. Our poetry books are The Llama Who Had No Pajama and Arnold Lobel Book of Mother Goose. We also read The Story about Ping, The Adventures of Curious George, Dolphin Adventure, and My Father’s Dragon.

We are working through LA1. She can read fairly well, but has very little grammar and spelling rules so she finishes her reading well but we have to work on writing and rules. She has a spelling test each week, grammar, and copywork. She is really good at story telling and creative activities. We have a word list book, I Can Read It, Book 3, a grammar workbook, and a handwriting workbook. 

I am able to have Joel and Ginny do science together. So we have been working through Science K on a bit of double time. We use Discover and do Science for our experiments and have a weekly selection from National Geographic’s Little Kids First Big Book of Why. We read Reptiles, Rainforests, and Bees and Wasps this unit.

For math, we are finally getting into a groove with Horizons 2. There were some gaps in there that I wasn’t expecting, but I think we might have worked through some of that and I ended up having her do math at the table by herself as she would get too distracted when everyone was there at the same time. 

For extras, I have Ginny doing Prodigy to help with her math skills. The little ones spend a good amount of time jumping on the trampoline or playing outside. I think this has helped her start to regulate her behaviors a little better.