After the holiday excitement of December, we returned to our normal school schedule right after the first of the year, and we tied up quite a few things we'd been working on since September and even got ahead on a few subjects in anticipation of the twins arriving in 5 to 8 weeks from now. Read on for a closer look at our progress.
First Grade with M., age 6
Math
This month, we zipped through the final chapters of
Singapore Primary Mathematics 2B, covering Capacity, Graphs, Geometry, and Area. As the month ended, M. was just finishing up Review 7 and Review 8 in the workbook. She will begin Singapore 3A this week.
In addition to her main math curriculum, M. is also continuing to work on memorizing addition, subtraction, and multiplication facts with the aid of
Xtra Math, and she is still memorizing the perfect squares. To accompany her studies of geometry and area, my husband also got her started playing
Cube Nets. (Though her accuracy isn't quite 100%, she is quicker than either of her parents at determining whether a net can be folded into a cube or not.) We also finally finished
Life of Fred: Dogs and moved on to
Life of Fred: Edgewood.
In the evenings, M. also likes to do some more challenging work on Khan Academy with my husband, who is introducing her to negative numbers and types of triangles.
History
We are still plowing through Ancient Greece. We read the Jane Werner Watson version of The Odyssey, followed by
The Parthenon by Elizabeth Mann,
Science in Ancient Greece by Kathlyn Gay, and
Men of Athens by Olivia Coolidge, and M. read
The Spartan Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins and
Lysis Goes to the Play by Caroline Dale Snedeker on her own. We also took a car trip one day and listened to the audiobook of
D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. Though all of these were great books, and she enjoyed them at the time, it's been difficult for her to keep track of all the unfamiliar Greek names. She is grasping the big picture, as evidenced by a nice narration she did about Athens and Sparta and some questions she was able to answer about the enmity between Athens and Persia, but I'm still not quite satisfied so we're going to read some picture books and do a few more activities before we move on.
Science
We finally finished reading
The Human Body: What It Is and How It Works, and I decided to switch gears to a topic that would allow M. to make good use of the microscope she got for her birthday: plants. We are reading about plants from
The Golden Treasury of Natural History by Bertha Morris Parker, and supplementing with information from websites and the
DK Nature Encyclopedia as needed. Each day that we read, we also choose an interesting plant and she does a quick report on it using
this worksheet from Enchanted Learning. (Our umbrella group has a subscription, which has been nice for accessing printables like this rather than having to make my own.) One day a week, we concentrate on using the microscope to look at plant material M. has collected outdoors, either on trips to the playground with my husband while I'm at the OB or around the outside of our house. She draws what she sees under the microscope on worksheets taken from
Magnificent Microworld Adventures by Mike Wood.
In January, she also worked on some Snap Circuits projects.
Health
I've been meaning to touch on the topic of calling 911 in an emergency with M. for a while, and we finally sat down and did it in the last week of January. We read the KidsHealth article,
How to Use 911 and watched a
video explaining what happens when someone calls 911. Then I created my own handwritten version of
this worksheet so she could identify when it is and is not appropriate to call for help. We finished the lesson with a narration about calling 911, which she illustrated with a drawing of a house on fire.
Reading
Our lunchtime read-alouds during the month of January were
Amahl and the Night Visitors by Frances Frost and Roger Duvoisin and
The Happy Hollisters at Snowflake Camp by Jerry West. Additionally, M. read a variety of books suggested to her by me and my husband including three titles in the Dorrie series by Patricia Coombs and
Alice: Some Incidents in the Life of a Little Girl of the Twenty-First Century, Recorded by Her Father on the Eve of Her First Day in School (all found on Open Library),
Prairie School by Lois Lenski, which I purchased for Kindle last year and allowed her to read in the Kindle app on her Chromebook,
The Glass Slipper by Eleanor Farjeon,
The Happy Orpheline,
A Brother for the Orphelines, and
A Pet for the Orphelines, all by Natalie Savage Carlson,
Freddy and Mr. Camphor by Walter R. Brooks,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Out of her studies of Ancient Greece in history and geometry in math, as well as our focus on Latin in our Catechism lessons, M. has also developed an interest in learning Greek and Latin prefixes and their meanings, so we're using
Extra Practice for Struggling Readers: Word Study, published by Scholastic, to do some work with those. (The book is geared toward struggling students in grades 3 to 6, which makes it perfect for an advanced kid in first grade.)
Memory Work
M. has nearly memorized her next poem, "Velvet Shoes" by Elinor Wylie.
Music
In January, we began each day with an episode of the Classics for Kids podcast, working our way through the week-long collections about composers Schubert, Prokofiev, Britten, and Mendelssohn. M. also practiced her piano and recorder daily. As part of our study on Prokofiev, we also listened to Peter and the Wolf and watched the Disney adaptation with David Bowie's narration.
Art
For art appreciation, we are now setting aside one day a week to read from
Looking at Pictures by Joy Richardson, which highlights works of art held in the collection of the National Gallery in London. In terms of creating art, M. was largely self-directed in January, though my husband worked with her some on cross hatching and creating textures. She also followed an instructional video on Art for Kids Hub to
draw a snowy church with bell.
Physical Education
M. continues to enjoy the Ten Thousand method workouts for kids on YouTube, so I try to have her do one of those 2-3 times a week. Because the weather has been so unseasonably warm, she has also had a trip to the playground pretty much every time I've had a doctor's appointment, and she is often able to get out and just run on the deck for a bit while her sisters nap.
Catechism
After months of listening to the St. Joseph Catechism on my homemade recording, we have gone back to using the book. I ask M. one new question a day, and then backtrack through all the questions in the current lesson. It seems to be working. We also concentrated on learning to chant Ave Maria and "Mortem Tuam" which we frequently hear at the Novus Ordo Mass we attend that uses Latin Mass parts. Our hymn for the month from Traditional Catholic Living was Holy God We Praise Thy Name.
Handwriting
M. has been using a program to learn the Palmer method of writing cursive for months. Just recently, she has begun to copy something other than individual letters or words, so I'll most likely be including copy work in these posts from now on. I really like the way her cursive is coming along. She will definitely have better handwriting than I do!
Pre-K with C., Age 4
Reading
C has grown into a full-fledged reader in just a few short weeks. She has started working her way through our collection of easy reader books, and there is no stopping her. She's already read dozens of books, including
Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss,
Piggle by Crosby Bonsall,
More Spaghetti I Say by Rita Golden Gelman,
Tales of Oliver Pig by Jean van Leeuwen,
Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik,
Snow by Roy McKie, Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman and
Last One Home is a Green Pig by Edith Thacher Hurd. She loves stories that rhyme, and funny stories, and stories about siblings, and pretty much any book she can manage to read on her own. We continue to work our way through
The Ordinary Parents' Guide to Teaching Reading, doing 1-3 lessons a day as her attention span permits. I also found a book on Open Library,
Mary-Mary Stories by Joan G. Robinson, which I thought would be perfect for her, so I've been reading that aloud just to C., and she seems to enjoy having a special book just for her.
Math
C. had fun playing
Swim to Ten a few times this month, and she also started concentrating more on handing the beads of the soroban using the correct finger movements. We practiced some basic addition and subtraction on the soroban, and continued to drill the number bonds that add up to five ("little friends") and ten ("big friends"). My husband also got her set up doing the Early Math mission on Khan Academy, and after just a few days, she was already 80% of the way through the kindergarten material, much of which involves counting and simple addition.
Memory Work
C.'s current poem is "White Fields" by James Stephens. She's also still working on being able to recite all the countries of Europe.
Scissors Practice
As I did with M. when she was four, I have given C. a book to practice cutting with scissors. With M., I used a book published by Kumon; this time, we have the
Preschool Cutting and Pasting Highlights Learn on the Go Practice Pad. She loves it, and she seems to have a natural aptitude for the scissors so she doesn't typically need much help from me.
