Review Week

I thought I should give an update for those of you who are following along with us this school year. I haven't posted lately, because I decided to take a couple weeks to review with Boo. She is officially a Kindergarten graduate now! She has finished all of the MFW K units with the exception of the Ii-Insect unit. We ended up skipping that one earlier in the year, because it was too cold to do our butterfly garden or our ladybug land. Boo did learn the letter "Ii" though and knows it well. We will go back one week this spring and have an insect week when it's warm enough to order our critters.

Looking over the 1st grade curriculum I'm a little worried, because it seems to advance so quickly. I plan on doing a lot of reviewing and to continue to work on reading and math with Boo throughout the summer months. She'll be reading Bob books, using MathUSee, continuing our daily Bible time, and we have some fun summer activities planned. Hopefully by fall she will be ready!

I fully trust MFW to cover all the things Boo needs to know in K. However, I also use this book as a guide to make sure we are on track...Home-Learning-Year-by-Year. It's a good resource for homeschoolers to have. This book lists all things students should be taught by the end of each grade level. I understand that some of these are a matter of opinion, and not all homeschoolers follow the same pattern as public schooling. I like to look it over at the end of each year though to make sure there's nothing major that we've forgotten.

These past two weeks we have reviewed:
*recognition of all upper and lower case letters
*vowels
*all letter sounds
*sight words learned so far
*blending letters to form 3 letter words
*writing letters and numbers
*days of the week
*months of the year
*recognition of #'s 1-100
*counting by tens
*plus, minus and equal signs
*coin recognition
*place value
*days of creation
*left and right
*five senses
*seasons
*words to remember and memory verses
*songs and poems we've learned

I will continue to post throughout the summer as we do projects or things school related, just not as often.

SIS HIGHLIGHT:

Sis is still over a month from finishing the 3rd grade. I may still post about her school activities occasionally.

She's only a couple weeks from finishing up spelling and math for the year! We finished reading Kirsten last week and began reading our growing Up in Pioneer America book, which is a non-fiction textbook that goes with her story books. She's taking notes and preparing to do an oral report on 1854. We decided to stay in the pioneer days for the remainder of this school year though, to do some fun crafts and activities. We began making our wooden model covered wagon and reading "The Cabin Faced West." We also have the Kirsten cookbook and craft book, so she is picking out some activities from each of those too.

We still have quite a way to go in our science text. We started learning about mollusks this week. We're learning about bivalves (mollusks with 2 shells that open such as clams, oysters, muscles, etc.) We got out our sea shell collection and separated all of the bivalve shells from the other mollusk shells. We are preparing for a field trip to Shedd Aquarium in a couple weeks too. She's so excited, because she knows so much more about ocean creatures now then the last time we were at an aquarium. She's excited to try to identify the different types of sea creatures and their parts.

We had fun dying Easter eggs during school one day this week. I decided to wait until baby bear is at least a year older to let her join us.