Fiona is almost done with 1st grade, however being as we are going to be schooling year round, that doesn't really mean anything to us. Though it will bring an end to weekly co-op classes, homeschool choir and Awana's. She is already stressed out about missing out on her weekly activities, we are already planning some fun things to do this summer...
Fiona finished her 1st grade math book two days ago! She was so excited and wanted to see and start her new math book right away! She finished Math-U-See Alpha and will be beginning MUS Beta soon, first we are taking a break from the curriculum to cover money and time, neither of which were covered in alpha, and aren't covered until half way into the beta book. I don't want to wait that long, especially for covering money. About 6 months ago I worked with Fiona on her skip counting by 5s and after both of us getting frustrated and math lessons ending in tears a few times, I just moved on... But you need to count by 5s for both money and time, so i was fully expecting to spend the next 2-3 weeks on the skip counting by 5s, but in yet another example of waiting being better then forcing, Fiona learned her skip counting in about half an hour!
In other news Fiona can read! She is half way through All About Reading 1, and has finished the Easy Peasy; Getting Ready 1. But more importantly she BELIEVES she can read! Instead of always saying "I can't read" even when faced with simple words that she can indeed read, she tries! A huge THANK YOU goes out to Mo Willems for his Elephant and Piggie books. Up until I found these at the library, Fiona hasn't had much interest in reading any beginner books. I can't really blame her, she listens to me read wonderful books to her, as well as the vast amount of audio books she has listened to, then when she goes to read books she gets "cat, fat cat, the fat cat sat, the fat cat sat on the mat. The end". No wonder she has no interest in reading :/ The elephant and piggie books are so different! They aren't 4 page booklets, they are 57 page books. And they are funny! There is humor in each one and so they are fun to read. I also like that there is so little as far as illustrations. In most readers the child doesn't need to look at the words at all to know what is going on, just look at the picture and make it up. Not so with these, most pages are completely blank with the exception of the very expressive animals. The child can look at the expressions on the animals faces and see from there how that characters words should sound (happy, sad, worried, excited....) The entire book is dialogue between the characters which makes it easy for co-reading.... I will be one character and Fiona the other. Fiona suddenly has a large library of Elephant and Piggie books, LOL.
The science we are doing is Science in the Beginning and we LOVE it! Its a great book with experiments or activities to do with every lesson. Some of the experiments are so basic I call them activities, but even the most basic one really helps Fiona understand the lesson and remember it! We don't do science as much as I like, because if the rest of the work doesn't get done fast enough its the subject that gets put off till another day, along with art and music, because they are all so fun :/ I'm hoping to get things running smoother and so we can get to science more regularly.
For geography we are learning the states. I am having her learn the states name, abbreviation and where it is on the map. I am not worried about capitals at this time. I was planning on adding one state a week, but really its been much longer between new states, I don't add a new one until she remembers all previous states without mistakes for a few days.
One of the few things Fiona really dislikes is writing practice. We get it done with less pain when its in the form of a letter to a penpal.
Music - we have begun free online piano lessons with Hoffman academy. We have only done lessons 1+2 so far, but they look good, and Fiona has really been into piano music and specifically Beethoven lately so I'm so thankful for the free lessons!
Art is done in the form of ATCs. We love making and trading ATCs! Here Fiona is practicing using some drawing step-by-step sheets before making her cards...
Thanks to both Lowes and Home Depot we are also able to have a wood building "class" at least once a month! These are so fun and free! The built items are pretty good and sturdy as well, being as Fiona plays with them and doesn't just have them on a shelf as a display :)
Finally (at least for this post) we have history.... We have at last finished Adventures in America. It is a good program for kindergarten, each lesson is one page with two questions at the bottom. We didn't do any of the activities other then the coloring pages. Now we are ready to begin Story of the World! I have been looking forwards to doing this curriculum for several years now! I wanted to cover our own country first which is why we started with Adventures in America, and now that we've begun I'm glad we waited, because I think she is remembering and understanding things more then she would have if we had begun this earlier. Fiona loves history (and science, music, art and English... really all subjects other then math, writing and sometimes reading... those she dislikes because they are hard and she hates getting answers wrong), Fiona loves hearing stories, and even if they are non fiction like her history or science texts, she loves listening to me read. She also loves any hands on activity I can find, so this history program with the vast amount of ideas out there for projects is perfect. It might end up taking us 2 years to get through the book with all the activities, but that is fine :D I plan on making many posts following our SotW journey! I will start writing the first SotW post as soon as I finish this post. So there will be at least 2 posts this year! LOL.
We are all over the place in our curriculum at this point. We have just begun our new history curriculum, will begin a new math curriculum in a month or two, but we are only half way through our reading and science books, and I couldn't be happier. I love that I can go as slow as needed in reading. Each lesson with new words takes between 1 week and 3 weeks depending on how many words she needs to learn. But we don't move on until she can read almost all the words without sounding them out. Then there are the lessons that only have reading a story, that is done in one day, because she can read all the words easily! But there is no rush of "we need to finish the rest of the book before June!" Nope. We might not finish AAR1 until October, and that is fine. We will just pick up our AAR2 book the next day and continue :D
A wonderful thing that I've noticed with her finishing things at different times is it really helps ease the financial burden of homeschooling. We don't need to buy everything all at once. Instead once we are coming towards the end of the current curriculum I can start checking out the sale sites and looking for what we are going to need to buy next!
