Our First Week!

We have officially completed the first week of homeschooling! It was fantastic! I'll break it down by kiddo, though it was great to see how much Firecracker paid attention to Sunshine's lessons and vice versa.

Pre-Kindergarten

We successfully completed the first week of the BookShark Pre-K curriculum. We loved all of the stories and poetry that we read this week. Instead of breaking the poetry out into different days, we did a "poetry tea party" on Wednesday. The girls baked something fun in their Easy-Bake Oven (which tasted much better than I expected), we set the table with flowers and made some fruity tea. While they were enjoying their tea we read poetry. We started with Mother Goose and ended with Shel Silverstein! They had a marvelous time.

The only part of the curriculum that we did not end up completing were the Developing the Early Learner books that are suggested. My daughter took an instant dislike to these. I attempted to make it light, but she was so frustrated by the one where you have to trace a line exactly that I didn't bother to come back to it. I will wait a few weeks and try again. I believe we have a perfectionist in the family!

We also finished capital letters A-E in the All About Reading program. She thinks that Ziggy the Zebra puppet is the best thing in the world and she loves the games that they suggest in the book. I'm a big fan of this program. They tell the parent exactly what to say and do so there is absolutely no prep work or thinking required. It also seems to be fairly effective, the first few lessons focus on rhyming words and I will say that Firecracker seems to be much improved in just five lessons.

Firecracker's current fine-motor fascination are these little gems called Beados. Have you seen them? Think perler beads that roll better. She's done five of the little patterns this week. The last one she did was larger so she got a little bored with it and asked for help. I was completely unable to help, my huge fingers cannot grip the little beads and place them without knocking about fifteen on the floor (and once they hit the floor...good luck).

First Grade

The first week of first grade went surprisingly well. We completed the first week of the BookShark curriculum here too, though I will say that I scheduled things in chunks instead of by day. For example, if there were two pages of the Animal Atlas assigned on three consecutive days and two pages of the Peoples of the World assigned on three consecutive days as well, I would do the Animal Atlas all on one day and the Peoples of the World on the next day. Changing books so much seems a little frenetic to me. I will continue to work my schedule so that we can really focus on one topic at a time.

Sunshine's favorite activity is language arts and the readers that are assigned with it. Again, we are doing the Grade 2 readers. The first one is Owl at Home, and she buzzed through it in two days (out loud...I'm pretty sure she's already read them all to herself). Surprisingly, she loved the copywork that came with the language arts package as well, but when asked to take her descriptive words and come up with a paragraph, she balked. I'm guessing it's because she didn't really understand the assignment. I did my best to explain it but once she had decided it was difficult, she really wasn't going to try. I finally talked her into just writing how she felt about her animal (Moose). "I love Moosey and Moosey loves me" is what we ended up with. I am just going to go slow with the writing because the actual act of writing seems tiring for her right now. I may have her dictate to me so I can write it for her next time, just to get the words on paper.

The science videos were a fun break for mom, and both girls went around the house playing with their magnets for the better part of two hours. They also built a giant tower with their magnatiles.

Math is a bit of a slog right now. We've completed most of the fun things in the Singapore Math 1 set, so we are down to practicing our addition and subtraction. She understands the concepts, but get bored practicing. I need to figure out a way to spice up her math life. She still loves Life of Fred. We introduced the Montessori stamp game this week as well. She took to it quickly and I'm hoping that this will be more entertaining for her.