MFW 1st grade: Week 5

The most exciting thing this week was that we celebrated Boo's 6th birthday! They grow up way too fast!

Her workload has definitely increased now that 1st grade is in full swing. The phonics has picked up this week and it has been taking Boo about an hour to finish her reading assignments each day! She's getting it though, so even though it's time consuming I'm glad she's learning to read. Each day her reading right now consists of a dictation exercise (where she will either read word aloud or write words that a read to her, tell me the sounds in a word, etc.) a workbook page, and a student sheet/ activity. This week we started learning some blends. We learned the sounds for /sh/ /ch/ /ng/ and /th/. I hung them on our bulletin board and we practiced them all week. We also started using our "reading chart" and will be highlighting sounds as we learn them throughout the year. Here are the little phonics mini books Boo made for her student sheet activities. She had to write words with that sound inside of each booklet.

Boo also learned her 2nd memory verse for the school year. This time however we started using these cute sheets to practice her handwriting by copying her verse.

In science we continued to learn about plants. This week we looked at trees.  Instead of planting a bean (since I forgot to buy one!) we put some corn kernels into a wet paper towel. We will water them everyday to see if we can get them to grow some roots.

We also made our history timeline this week. It will be a few weeks yet before we start using it. We decided to use a tri-fold board that can be folded up and stored instead of using a wall for our time line. I also decided not to add all of the dates yet as the curriculum suggests. I remember having a problem placing the dates too close when Sis was in 1st then we didn't have room for all of our pictures, so I will add the dates as we go through history. This week we added "creation." Our picture was Gen 1:1 written in Hebrew that we learned about last week. We're looking forward to starting our history stories and notebook journal soon.