Grade One Work Weekly Update

Starting to do some more formal math with Tori and Katie…Today, we started Singapore Math 1B (This is leftover from Elizabeth and I haven’t gotten around to even buying workbooks yet.)…

We worked through almost half the book and got into place value. I brought out the cute little pipe cleaner bead strands I made a while back (they were totally unimpressed then!). I used shiny silver pipe cleaners and 10 blue plastic beads for each strand. I scrunched the ends of the pipe cleaners to hold the strands together.

I stopped at page 33. I got tired. My throat is sore!

So, here’s the funny story. The equation was 15-3=? and I laid out 1 tens bead strand and 5 ones beads. I grabbed three beads and asked them what was left. Katie hollered out, “12!” I thought that was pretty amazing that they really were getting this. I asked her how she knew that, expecting her to explain how she got the answer using the beads or something…

With her head cocked to the side, she replied, condescendingly, “Mom, I just thinked it.”

Of course you did, Honey. How silly of Mama to underestimate you. Obviously, we need to move on to grammar and subject-verb agreement now.

We studied the phases of the moon this week. They had charts and matching pages. Check out my astronomy Pinterest board for fun learning ideas.

Tori working on her space workbook. (My dad is retired Army, hence the Tshirt.)

Eating purple grits! that big sister Lizzie made one morning. She’s been playing with food coloring lately. We have a different color of lemonade every day too.

Morning message writing.

I found some fun free pages and I plan to incorporate that idea into our morning work now since the girls loved it so much. The calendar notebooks weren’t working out so well. I’ve since updated our calendar yet again and done away with the notebooks altogether.

Our calendar board is two sided. I use the Calendar Connections for our monthly themes. On the other side, I just re-created all the focus points. I have our quarterly poet, composer, and artist at the top. I have our Bible verse and character trait and pledges and the Lord’s Prayer. I have a poem, song, and hymn on the bottom. The blue background has our word family, a French word, and a German word. I haven’t quite worked out what to put in that fourth quadrant yet. The blank space on the bottom will probably have our animal of the week to go with science. Always a work in progress!

We do Bible and calendar time during or right after breakfast in the little living room right by the kitchen and dining area. Then, the girls and I do other school activities in the basement.

Here are the girls’ shelves with Montessori works and the word wall above. In the shelves, I have a moveable alphabet with Lauri letters and silent E worksheets, a red basket full of Unifix cubes that they love to do patterns, some paper weaving seahorses, flower arranging, hot dots short and long vowels, some file folder games, a sentence dice activity, and an animal book with an animal fact learning wheel.

Katie’s green box holds her notebooks and personal school items. Tori has a blue box in the picture above, under the easel and beside her table. This has worked well for us the past few weeks. We used to use workboxes, but now we have evolved into work folders, kept in the colored boxes.

We’re doing 1st grade work now! **Exciting**

We’re now working through our word families. We’ve done –an, –and, and –ad so far. Those are in the blue pocket chart. The red chart holds Easter words and will have a theme each week or month or whenever we change.

Our read alouds:

We’re finishing Tapestry of Grace Year 1 Unit 4. We’re beginning Apologia’s Zoology 3: Land Animals of the Sixth Day. We also are reading Christian Liberty Nature Reader 1. We’re reading through Beatrix Potter and loving it. Dad even hopes he’s around for those readings – he’s a Peter Rabbit fan! History for Little Pilgrims is fun and simple and they love the coloring book with it! We’re working through First Language Lessons 1. We’re reading Green Thumbs and we’re ready to start a garden!

We’ll take off a couple weeks in July when we have friends and family visit.

Do you school year round or take a big summer break?