School Days~ Week #4 and #5

Here is a peak at what Week #4 and #5 (Aug 27-31 and Sept 3-7) looked like for us...

FIRST GRADE:

Reading this week included finishing out the alphabet and reviewing all the short vowel sounds that we learned back in the MFW-Kindergarten curriculum. He did excellent on this. In week #5 we also began our long vowels study with long vowel a_e and long vowel e_e and ee. We love the Animal Tales booklet that is provided for reinforcing each of the long vowel studies. Here are the Animal Tales pages for Long A and Long E. Little Britches copies the sentence he's given and then he is supposed to illustrate it.

 A multi-tasking cat!

 I admit. This one made me giggle. I would have to say I'd be in the same shape as those men if I saw a green snake that big too!

Our Activities have been...

* Putting together our A-Z scroll that we made

 Bible:

Our two scriptures for memorization...

Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge. Proverbs 23:12

 He who guards his mouth and his tongue keeps himself from calamity. Proverbs 21:23

Little Britches revised this to say "...keeps himself from spankings." LOL!

Science (from the MFW curriculum)

*How Flowers Grow from Usborne Book "Things Outdoors"

We reviewed the growing process of a flower from seed to making seeds. We drew the four ways that seeds are dispersed and then we collected four different colors of flower blossoms to determine which could be used for a dye.

Collecting blossoms...

Mashing them with water to release the color...

Soaking a coffee filter with the water from the bags
(Of the Butterfly Bush, Phlox, Marigolds and Roses we collected, the Marigolds and Phlox flowers were the only colored dye water that was made)

*Trees: from Usborne Book "Things Outdoors"

We learned about the different parts of a tree and what they are used for. We discovered we could count the rings on a stump to determine the age of a tree. During our Exploration day we did bark rubbings on four trees (Apple, Cherry, Walnut and Hickory) and then collected tree seeds. We also found some other incredibly beautiful things which you can read about HERE.

Math (from the MFW Curriculum)

*Sorting/Classifying and Numbers/Counting

We just did the worksheets assigned in the manual. These were very easy units for Little Britches so he flew through them.

Social Studies

*Geography

We are continuing to work through our geography book (Beginning Geography by Evan Moor). The units covered were all about Map Borders and the Map Grids. We finished the main Map unit with two review tests which I'm tickled to say he scored 100% on!

*History

Week #4 had us back in The Story of the World learning about the Nomads. This is a great tie in from the story of Creation and the "Adam" family because you can discuss what God told Cain in Genesis about him being a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth--and how it is generally believed by the NON-evolutionists that the Nomads were Cain's descendents. We had to tweak some of the language away from the evolutionary feel it had, but it was still an enjoyable chapter.

We learned about where the fertile crescent is...

and about the shaduf...

which I had Little Britches make out of LEGOS. Pretty nice, huh?!

Week #5 put us forward in time studying about Noah and the flood. We used THIS for our study review over Noah. Once we finished up Noah, I had Little Britches color and put the Noah timeline from Biblestoryprintables.com in order to tell the story. It really helped remind him the order of the story and he can now use it to tell everyone the story.

Art

My mother-in-law did cave paintings during week #4 to tie in with our studies on the Nomads using brown paper and paint. She's saving Little Britches best work in a portfolio and saved his paintings from this week.

Week #5, she did a cute little Noah's Ark boat!

 Little Britches came home wanting to experiment to see if it would float in the bathtub--we haven't tested it yet. LOL! Hmm. I just noticed in the picture that Noah is needing a haircut! LOL!

Tot School:
We didn't do much this week because he was being VERY contrary as most 2 year olds can get. But he did enjoy playing with the counting puzzle cards. I would show him one half of the puzzle card and ask him to find the matching one. He did very well, matching up nearly all 25 of the cards before he lost interest.

Things are going well, but some days I'm just at a loss with what to do for Baby Britches because he is demanding and so stinkin' stubborn!

So my take on what we have done so far...we are loving the My Father's World First Grade curriculum! It has been so fun to teach and I really love the way they are teaching the new phonics for the new sounds. Very easy for him to understand and I can apply it to our reading out-loud in general. We also love the Science that is worked into each week.