Week One of First Grade!!!

Here we are, a new school year. Ella is registered with an umbrella school and we are officially doing school and counting days! What this entails is me drawing a little circle around the dates on a calendar that we do 4 hours of school work. I bought a red lesson plan book that I'm recording our daily work in for my own records.

We spent our first week finishing up Kindergarten work from My Father's World. I quit documenting our weeks on my blog, but we continued with My Father's World curriculum through the summer, and we are one day from being finished! This past week, we learned about butterflies, frogs, foxes, vegetables, and quails. That's 5 weeks worth of MFW curriculum in 5 days, plus we added some to the curriculum as well. Here are some highlights:

Birdhouse painting

Vegetable as stamps paintings

Vegetable and Vegan cheese roll ups

Celery dying

Wearable butterfly wings

Butterfly Art

Days of the week sight words & order

Seahorse from Your Big Backyard magazine

We also added to Ella's nature journal her drawing of a Red Velvet Ant that we saw in our yard. She made a book about frogs with lots of wonderful sentences describing pictures of frogs doing things like eating, laying eggs, swimming, etc. I was so proud of her book! She has come a long way in her writing this year!! We read lots of books, started on a quilt craft, baked oatmeal bars, made egg salad sandwiches, did daily Bible reading, Bible stories, and Bible devotions, practiced counting to 100 and worked on our 100 chart, drew pictures, and watched a documentary on butterflies. Ella acted out the life cycles of frogs and butterflies without me even prompting her to just because she thought it was fun. She and Matthew made a model of a barge with blocks after seeing one on the river. Ella read several stories as well as some books to me, wrote in her journal, and did lots of worksheets. I can't believe all we accomplished this week, and I'm excited about next week! We have some really exciting field trips coming up and we get to begin our "First Grade" work.

Matthew also did lots of "Preschool" work himself. He painted a lot, he helped with our cooking projects, I read to him, we sang songs, we made a quilt craft about him, and he started SOCCER!!!

Matthew at his first soccer practice!

Matthew's Quilt Craft

The poem says, "Blond is my hair, Blue are my eyes. I'm 3 years old. I'm just the right size. My name is Matthew, and as you can see, I'm very happy to be me!"

Matthew making his own sandwich

Today while we were all at the table doing school work, Matthew said to Ella, "You are the best!" and gave her a big hug. I am so so joyful that my children love eachother and get to spend each day together. Their relationship is beautiful. They are eachother's best friends, and I love watching them delight in eachother's successes. Noone is more proud than Matthew starting soccer this week than Ella!