1st 6 Weeks of 1st Grade

Ben has been cruising along in 1st grade and squeaked out week 6 while we were transitioning Hannah. I’m enjoying going through some of this material again.

Our morning devotion is Hannah’s bible reading for Girl’s Ministries but Benjamin is doing a separate bible reading out of the Beginner’s Bible as a reader and we are working through a great intro to Christianity book called Leading Little Ones to God. He also memorized Psalm 1 over the first 6 weeks and presented it to Daddy last weekend.

In history/social studies, we started at the beginning with creation and have made it to Israel’s first king, Saul. We have two main history books as our spines, Usborne Book of World History and A Child’s History of the World. We’re learning about the earliest civilizations we have records of. He made a clay tablet to try out picture writing, but I’m pretty sure that his big sister broke it and disposed of it without telling him. We also finished a book called Usborne Book of People’s of the World that introduces how there are different people groups in the world and interesting things about them and a book called Archaeologists Dig for Clues. We started a corollary to the people book called Usborne Book of Houses and Homes that we’ll finish up soon.

For Read Alouds (book I read to him) we have a poetry book we’ll be reading all year called Favorite Poems of Childhood and we sprinkle in some Mother Goose throughout. We have a missionary book called Missionary Stories with the Millers that will last awhile as well. We read Charlotte’s Web (and watched the movie) and Homer Price and started a book called Little Pear.

Language goes fairly well. Benjamin doesn’t like writing, but does a good job of it once he’s been convinced to do it. He has one cursive assignment per week to keep it fresh since he learned that over the summer. He will be working through Wordly Wise A this year for vocabulary, doing Sonlight spelling, and is currently in Explode the Code 4 for phonics.

Science is fun this year. We have Usborne World of Animals which is a great book. It breaks things down by continent and then by region/ecosystem so it incorporates a bit of geography review too. We finished Night Animals and started See How It’s Made which lasts all year. His experiments are all about magnets. He has made magnetic boats and moved things with magnets. So far, we’re only a couple assignments behind in science. Woohoo!

Ben enjoys math and we’re getting into some longer worksheets in Horizons 2. He does well but we usually cut the problems in half if he is getting them all correct.

We have two main extracurricular activities: Royal Rangers and piano. He seems to be enjoying piano and most of the time will practice without my prompting. He has worked through most of the basics of the first piano book we have so our teacher is starting him on some new things. Rangers has been a lot of fun and he gets to do that with Daddy as his teacher. They will be having a day camp soon and a fall weekend camp in November. We also have a weekly park day and try to have playdates with friends and neighbors.