Week 1 in Review

We started Thing 1's first grade work this week!  It's been interesting to say the least.  Afterall, we're going from an almost entirely Unschooling method for the day, to a more Classical method.

Math is the beginning and end of each day.  The focus right now is on review of addition facts, since Thing 1 has learned a good number of them in Math-U-See Alpha, but (due to breaks and me not pushing the issue) had forgotten them.  Or at the very least had a lot of difficulty recalling them.  So I have been printing sheets from Worksheet Works.com for Thing 1 to use to drill his addition facts.  He does the first half first thing in the morning, and the other half is the signal that our day has ended.  This is the only subject he drags his feet on.  He's relying on the manipulatives right now, but in the coming week I am hoping that we'll be able to use those less and less, as we'll be using some more fun-type methods for practicing these facts.

Everything else is going really well.  He seems to really like narration assignments from Writing with Ease and Story of the World.  And he really likes the activities from our Literature Pockets.

Because he is able to read and write, spelling has been a bit of a joke.  I had slated to have him doing one lesson a day for pretty much all of Spelling Workout A, but then Thursday of this week he decided he wanted to do a few lessons all at once.  So we will likely continue this until we get to a point where I feel he should slow down.  I don't know when this will happen, but I am certainly hoping it's before the end of level C, since that's all we have in the house right now ;)

Science this week was just learning the difference between living and nonliving things, which he pretty much already knew but I figured it wouldn't hurt to review a bit.  Afterall, this being the first week, I didn't want things to be toooooo hard.

Thing 1 with his bird puppet, a project from the Literature Pocket for the nursery rhyme "A Little Bird"

The current ongoing project for school is a family history, from Story of the World's activity guide.  There is a page for each family member, and when we have a short/boring day, we'll take it out and add another person or expand on an individual's information.  We've gotten the pages started for each family member so far, with birthdays listed.

I am using Homeschool Tracker's Basic Edition to make sure our lessons are planned for each day and to record how well Thing 1 does on them.  I am also using the Daily Journal portion on there so that I can record things like how Thing 1 reacted to a particular topic, how his attitude was for the day, what worked well, what didn't work well and what I can do to make things easier.  I may someday invest in the full version of Homeschool Tracker, but for right now, it does everything I need it to.

Something unexpected that came out of Thursday was the news that Thing 1 wants to be an author and illustrator.  And he wants to practice for that by making books now.  So we now have a bunch of little books premade for him to grab at his whim (as long as his school work is done!) to write and draw.  He's currently decided to focus on animals, so the animal encyclopedia is in use.  I LOVE that he's so enthusiastic about this.  (and that it gives him additional writing practice and learning whatever topic he is focusing on at the moment... I won't lie, I like the additional benefits as well ;) )


Thing 2 has been into everything as usual, but he is progressing in potty training.  AND he can count to 2!  his speech has come a long way in the last few weeks, which is wonderful because before we could understand very little of what he was saying.


Voom is just Voom ;)  He's taking in the sights, putting up with his brothers wanting to help with him all the time.  Keeping his parents up at night.  Typical newborn stuff.  And he's already a month old today!


My boys are all growing up too fast!  Make it slow down!