Summer Vacation

First grade and pre-k has come to an end. Our last day of school for the 2012-2013 school year was May 31. We really had a great year. There were some very difficult days that made me want to drop Zoey off at the local public school and run away as fast as I could but there were also many, many wonderful days too. Like the days when Zoey finally understood a math concept or Sierra learned a new letter. It just amazes me another year of school has gone by.

This year is the first year Zoey had to be tested with a Standardized Test. I received her results a few days ago and she did exceptionally well. I think some of it has to do with the fact that she is older for a first grader. She just missed the cut off being born in September. Also, she seems to be really smart like her father.

We spent the last day of school going to Discovery Place Kids and Discovery Place. We had a blast. 

That is funny to me that she is holding up a slow sign. Lol

So we now officially have a second grader in the house. 

Sierra did not want her picture taken. 

I have already decided on and ordered curriculum for next year.  Sierra can't wait for kindergarten and she is so ready. Lately she has been answering some of Zoey's questions. It makes me laugh and makes Zoey mad. It seems Sierra is smart like Daddy too.

So now we will enjoy our summer break. I'm sure it will go all too fast. School starts in August. I'm already excited. If I get a chance I'll try to update with some highlights from the past school year.

101st day of school

I was going to blog when it was our 100th day of school but I missed it. Oops! So here we are on the 101st day of school. Today Zoey finished the First Language Lessons book Volume 1. We did the review at the end and she did great. I am amazed at how much she has learned about grammar. She also has memorized several poems and grammar definitions. In the middle of the lesson she told me how grammar is helping her with math and math is helping her with other things. She also told me she can see numbers in her head and that is how she does her math. I thought that was cute. I guess the mental math approach is sinking in.

Speaking of math, Zoey is 3/4 the way done with her first grade math work in Singapore Math. She is about 1/2 way through Miquon 1st grade math. The programs work so well together. She had the cuisenairre rods available to use when ever she wants but is using them less and less. A few days ago she was working a problem and she took a few 10 rods out then she stopped before she had all she needed. I could tell by the look on her face she was figuring it out in her head. She did it! She likes addition much more than subtraction but then don't we all? Right now she loves to do fractions in the Miquon program.

We have started a new program for learning to write. It is called Writing With Ease. It is an easy program that consists of two days of copy work, and two days narration. Each week the copy work and narration is based on passage from well knows stories. For example the first week was from Little House on the Prairie. The copy work gives her a choice of sentence length and is very manageable for her. The narration consists of me reading a passage from the story and then asking her questions about what I just read. She has to answer in complete sentences and this is the part she really did not like at first. She is OK with it now but would prefer to just give a fragment answer. A side benefit of this program is Zoey wants to read the whole story when we are done with the week. Right now we are reading through Pinocchio. It is nothing like the Disney movie. No surprise there right. We are only five weeks in to this program but we are definitely going to stick with it. It only takes a few minutes a day and the benefits can already be seen.

Zoey is also almost done with her phonics program. She should be done by the end of January. It is amazing how well she is reading but she still needs much practice.

This week gym class and science class started back. Zoey loves both of these and was so happy to return. Sierra is able to take some science classes now too. Not as often as Zoey but when she does she LOVES it. Sierra also started gym class this week which she also loves.

We have continued with the book of the week for both of the girls too. The last book we did in December for Zoey was The Duchess Bakes a Cake and for Sierra was The ABC Bunny. The both ready enjoyed the books and we even made a bunny cake! Over the winter break we worked on a unit study about volcanoes. We did it while taking a break from our regular school work. We are still reading and talking about volcanoes. They are watching a video about Pompeii right now. Zoey has been interested in volcanoes for a long time so she loved this study. One fun thing we did was make edible models of the earth. We put it together layer by layer then cut it in half to see the layers. Finally they ate it up! I was going to add pictures here but the upload function is not working right now. Boo!

Sierra is doing great with learning her letters, numbers, shapes, colors and so much more that she constantly surprises me.

I guess that is all for now. It is hard to believe that we are over half way through the school year. I have a feeling May will be here before I know it. Thanks for reading and I will share pictures through Shutterfly when I get a chance.

Today...

Today I teach my seven year old,
My first grader, my first born.
She is hear for me to hold and love,
While others can only mourn.
She is a wonderful surprise,
Thought she'd never come our way.
And yet she's here and her sister too,
Just thankful for another day.

Fun times at Creekside

We are well into our second month of this school year and things are going well. We have had a few rough moments and at least one really ugly day but so far I am pleased with everything. Zoey is really enjoying her new math programs and Sierra seems to be picking up number value with lightening speed. Sierra loves to count things and now is adding small numbers. Not on paper, but for example the other day she was finishing a bowl of cereal. I asked her to take two more bites and she did. She then came over to me and said she had already eaten four bites and shows me four fingers. Then she tells me she had two more. She puts two more fingers up. Next she says, "That means I had six bites because see, 1, 2, 3, ..." she proceeds to count her fingers up to six. The the other day I saw her standing on Mom and Dad's deck counting the chairs and she let me know we needed one more chair for dinner. Kids can be so amazing. Of course if we are going somewhere Sierra does not want to go she CANNOT walk but hey she can count to six!

Sierra is also enjoying doing "The Letter of the Week." We just finished "C" and she is finding "C's" where ever we go. Zoey makes me laugh when she wants to do some of the letter of the week activities too. So far I have kept it very simple and only do things when she wants. It is always a challenge with both of them to give them enough to keep them learning and interested but not so much that they burn out and dislike learning.

Sierra is sharing her caterpillar C that she partially laced.  Zoey wanted to do the caterpillar activity too.

Zoey is progressing well with reading, math and handwriting. We just finished learning about silent letter and are now on R-changed vowels. It used to be so hard just to get her through a reading lesson and now it is a breeze. Math can be a challenge some days but the new curriculum we are using has games included and we both have fun with those. It is amazing to see her go from struggling with something to having confidence doing it just because of playing a card game a few times.


In history we are continuing with American History.

We learned about Abraham Lincoln and made hats. Sierra did not want a tall "boy" hat so she made a short pink one. What a funny girl.

 

In science we have had a few failed science experiments in a row but the girls are having so much fun with the garden on our back patio. The sunflowers we planted earlier this year bloomed and dried out. Zoey got seeds from the flower and planted them in other pots. They are growing quite well. She did the same with the marigold flowers. One day they discovered bugs all over the green bean plants.  Then they had great fun smacking them off with brooms and then squishing them with their shoes. Gross! We did the celery in colored water and that worked quite well.

 



Here the girls are enjoying doing some nature sketching. They sat there quietly drawing for the longest time.

Here are a few pictures of the garden in August before the bugs took over the green bean plants.

Now that it is September gym class and science classes have started back up. That always adds excitement and challange to our days. We also are having fun with the Five in a Row curriculum.  So far we have done Miss Rumphius, Daniel's Duck, The Finest Horse in Town, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World with Five in a Row. This is primarily for Zoey but Sierra joins in. For Sierra we do Before Five in a Row. The books we have done so far are, Goodnight Moon, The Carrot Seed, Blueberries for Sal, Corduroy, and We're Going on a Bear Hunt. I wish I had time to write updates every week then I would be able to share what we did with each book. Oh well, here are a few pictures.

Playing with buttons after reading Corduroy.

Zoey and the Purple Crayon.

Zoey cutting up celery for the chicken stew we made. It was a recipe to go along with the book Daniel's Duck. She was so surprised I let her use a sharp knife. I was so surprised I did too and that she did so well.

 

We just started Follow the Drinking Gourd with Zoey and Angus Lost with Sierra. I am excited about all the learning opportunities these books present.

 

As soon as I upload all of my pictures to Shutterfly I will share them so you can see more if you would like.  I just realized the other day I hadn't uploaded any since last December!

 

Thanks for reading and sharing in our journey as we teach our children at home. Also, I wrote this on and off over a few weeks so if it is choppy I apologise.

Five in a Row contest

Today is the last day to enter the Before Five in a Row contest. Check it out here... https://twitter.com/beckylosthermin/status/246644369480896512

Did I mention that I won a book on Tuesday! I am so excited. It is called Higgens Bend Song and Dance. We will use it next year when Zoey moves on to volume 4 of Five in a Row.

They're Back!

We are back in school for the 2012 / 2013 school year. We officially started Monday, August 6 and had a great week. The first few days Zoey couldn't get enough of school and Sierra was thrilled with her own workbooks. By Friday Zoey only wanted to do one math lesson instead of two or three. One lesson a day works for me. Sierra has always had Zoey's old workbooks to play with but this year I got her a few of her own. She still wants me to make "math worksheets" for her. Her "math", as she calls it, is a paper divided into four parts. In each part I make an activity for her at her level. I include simple things like matching, mazes, copying letters or numbers and simple pictures to color. They are not beautiful or wonderful in any way but she loves them and asks for more. I don't love making them but I keep doing it because well she is so cute!

We started of Monday by taking first day of school pictures. Well, they opened their new backpacks (thanks Grandma) with all the new school stuff in it first then we took pictures. Here are a few highlights...

After a while Zoey said she was tired of all the pictures. I laughed and thought, did she just get here? I always take tons of pictures.

So anyways, the first week went very well. Zoey is using new math curriculum but pretty much everything else is the same. History and Science will be changing when we finish what are currently working on. We are still using Five in a Row with Zoey and I started Sierra with Before Five in a Row. They join in with each others books so it is working very nicely. The book Zoey did this week was, Daniel's Duck by Clyde Robert Bulla and Sierra did Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown.  Although this was our first official week of school we did FIAR (Five in a Row) the week before this just to warm back up to school. It was a nice week with FIAR only. Zoey did Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney and Sierra did Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey. We had a great time with all of the books. I love to see how Sierra is remembering things with this curriculum and just having a blast. So now I am off to decide what we will be doing this next week. Thanks for reading.

The Story of Ferdinand

I promised a while ago (two months) to share how our week with Ferdinand went. I thought for sure I would get to it way before now. I will try to keep it simple and short so I actually finish it. So here goes...

The book of the week was The Story of Ferdinand. I set up a little thing called a teaser. It is a collection of items including books, pictures, and anything else you can think of that go along with the book. The girls were excited when they saw it and couldn't wait to get started.

We started off the week as we always do. After reading the book we colored our story disk and found Spain on our world map. Both Zoey and Sierra are doing the story disks this year so there isn't much room on the map for all of our story disks but we are making it work. Next we learned a little about Spain. We tried out some Spanish dancing and a few Spanish words.

On Tuesday we learned about interjections. Wow! Zoey thought every sentence that ended with and exclamation point was an interjection so I had to explain the difference. Later in the week she added a few interjections to some pictures she drew. Very cute. We also talked about how this story is a fantasy story and not a true story.

The next day Zoey and Sierra acted out some of the scenes in the book. I expected this to be fun and it was. Also very fun was finding the humor in the illustrations.  We tried to come up with what some of the people were saying and this made Zoey laugh uncontrollably. She begged me to do it over and over again every time we read the story after this.

Zoey the Matador

For applied math on Thursday I showed the girls how many inches are in a foot and how many feet in a yard. Next I measured them on their growth chart to see how much they grew, just like Ferdinand.

To close out the week we learned about vultures. There is a vulture pictured in the book. This lead Zoey wanting to know more about scavengers. On the back of the vulture book we got from the library it showed other scavenger books. We were all excited that our library had them and we reserved them online. We also learned about cork. We watched a video on YouTube to see how cork grows and is harvested. I also had a surprise set up for Zoey and Sierra. I told them it was not exciting but just something funny. I took a bunch of corks I had (thanks mom) and attached them together with paperclips and attached it to a tree in the backyard. In the book Ferdinand likes to sit under a cork tree. One of the funny things about the illustrations in the book is that the cork tree has corks hanging from its branches. We had talked all week how that is not how cork trees really look. Zoey laughed and laughed at the corks hanging from our tree. Sierra giggled some too. The picture below isn't great but you get the idea.

Next we made small boats using corks, tooth picks, and paper. I let them test out their boats in a small container of water. That was fun but soon the boats were changing into other things and they were gone into pretend land. It was so funny to watch. They really crack me up.

We had a great time with Ferdinand. We have not been doing Five in a Row every week this year but I am glad we are back to doing it. It is so much fun and what they learn really stays with them.

Sisters!