MFW 1st Grade - Week #15

This week shot off with a bang....Caleb is doing so well.  He still dislikes a few aspects of what we do, but overall, he is doing a great job.

BIBLE/READING:  Lots of bible work this week with the story "A Son for Abraham" and "A Wife for Isaac."  The bible lessons were really lengthy and Caleb was a trouper through it all!  Here are pictures from his Bible Notebook with illustrations from the bible stories.  For a son for Abraham, we copied the page from his Bible Reader and he colored that.  I was surprised, he generally does what one would call "scribble scrabble."  In this one, he attempted to stay in the lines.

For the "Wife for Isaac" illustrations he wanted me to find some graphics on-line for the camels...I guess the thought of drawing one seemed a bit overwhelming.  If I'm honest, it was for me also...

Here were the word lists from his student workbook.  He gets a little frustrated with the writing, but this week I saw less frustration than in previous weeks.  So, maybe he's feeling a little more confident.

Mixed in between the bible lessons are the new reading rules and dictation worksheets.  There are more than 70 rules to learn this year and we are excited that we are down to the last 1/3.  Here's our list - we highlight each new rule as we cover it!  There is definitely more highlighted words than unhighlighted words.

Here's one of the workbook pages from this week...learning that "e, i, and y" are sometimes "changers." They change the "g" from sounding like the "g" in "gum," to a "j" sound like in the word "page."  Quite tricky....

And a couple of worksheets - where he had to write sentences from the workbook, and one of them he was to illustrate something from the sentences.  He's really caught on and specifically asked me to get some pictures from on-line...."so we can stick them down..."   ;o)

BIBLE TIMELINE:   With nearly every bible lesson comes the addition of a picture on our time line...I haven't showed our timeline in a while, but here it is, nearly up-to-date.  I used our fancy-shmancy laminator to protect the pictures after Caleb colored them...

SCIENCE:  This week we read from the "Things Outdoors" book and talked some about snow and ice. We looked at the globe and found the north and south poles.....we also cut out paper snowflakes....and looked at frost in our freezer to get an idea what snow looks like.  Not incredibly exciting....but we accepted the light science load with a shrug of the shoulder and just spent more time on our bible.

MATH:  We studied clocks and telling time this week...Caleb can read time when it's a "straight up on the hour" time and the math assignments this week reinforced that.  Towards the end of the week we started to study telling time on the "half-hour."  A confusing concept, but we'll keep at it!

READ-A-LOUDS:  It's rather exciting to me to be able to add this section to our list of activities for this week.  To date, Caleb has read from his Bible Reader and really dislikes it because it involves a LONG story, usually 2-3 full pages.  Well, I found some beginning readers from Scholastic (thank you Natalie) and have placed them on the shelf in front of him.  At the end of school every day, he grabs them and WANTS to read them...!!!   Yes, WANTS to!!  I am so thrilled with that.  They are super easy and as we go through the stack they will get a little bit harder.   

HANDS-ON ACTIVITIES:   We had a couple of hands-on activities this week, one of which involved a quick romp in the sand box.  During the story of a "Wife for Isaac," Jacob's servant went to find a wife for Isaac, taking with him ten camels loaded with valuable gifts.  We used a pencil and poked it on loose sand to see how easily it would sink.  But, after taping a quarter to the eraser of the pencil, and again poking into the sand we saw that it did not sink as easily.  This was a great visual to show how the large hooves of the camel help it to walk on top of the sand, keeping it from sinking.

We had two hands-on activities we did not do this week.  One was to make small "water jars" out of clay and the other was to make Lentil soup.  We already made a clay pot earlier this year and Caleb really didn't seem interested in forming clay into pots again.  I was okay with that.  

As for lentil soup, okay, so maybe it would have been fun to make soup together, but I just didn't see any reason to make a pot of soup, with ingredients that no one would eat - except maybe me....So, the next time I make a pot of chicken soup or something similar, I will have Caleb help me and we will talk about the third bible story for this week which was "Esau and Jacob."  The very story where Jacob tricks his father into giving him the blessing that is supposed to be for his brother Esau.  It revolves around Isaac requesting some "tasty" food before he dies.  Well, I guess in this case we were to make the lentil soup....This project will be put on hold, or maybe post-poned is a better word....until another day...

I'm thrilled with Caleb and his enthusiasm for school the last couple of weeks....Even our "bluebook," which normally takes him SOOOOOO long to do by the time he procrastinates at every step, has been done at a respectable pace.  I'm proud of him and his progress....

Until next week....

Walking with the King,

Pam

MFW 1st Grade - Week #14

Back in the saddle again......(Even if my post is going up late....)

We definitely are.  After a little over a week off during the Christmas and New Year season, we timidly went back to school with a light load for a few days trying to ease back into it.  I don't know if we were just refreshed or what it was, but when we went back into the full swing of things it was a STELLAR week!!

BIBLE:

Verse for the week - "Every word of God is flawless; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him."  Proverbs 30:5


We started off the week with a deeper dig into the story of Noah.  With that came a study of rainbows for science.  One of his workbook pages included this sheet:

Never a big fan of coloring, we took turns coloring in the rainbow.  Caleb did the ark and the mountain himself...

Bible Activities following the story of Noah:

Measuring Noah's Ark - we talked about Cubits and how during bible time people did not have rulers or yard sticks to measure.  So, it was based on Cubits, which was about 18" long and was typically the distance between a persons elbow and their finger tip....

To give us an awesome visual on just how big the Ark actually was, we measured it off - 300 cubits....We started at our mailbox.

And after about twenty cubits we decided to just use mommy's steps....300 cubits was a long way to make Caleb stay bend over to move the yard stick, which we calculated as two cubits.

70 Cubits

And ended up way down our street and around the curve in the road.  I now wish we'd started in a straight-a-way, but oh well.  Caleb was still able to see just how far 300 cubits actually is.

Make a Boat - an aluminum foil boat that is....then, let's put in some pennies and see how many pennies it takes to sink the boat...

Caleb's boat on the bottom of the fish pond!  One penny too many and we sunk the ship!

We brought them back inside and counted how many pennies were in each boat before they sunk.  The winner?  Well, Caleb's, of course!!   25 pennies and 1 accidentally place nickel sunk mom's boat and it took 37 pennies to sink Caleb's boat!

Our second bible story for this week was that of the Tower of Babel.  There was a fun project for that also....

Our books of the bible memorization is going quite well.  At the end of this week we are already on Proverbs...

Geneses, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, (This is how much I have memorized so far....LOL), Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, and Proverbs.

MATH:  This week math topic is simple graphing....We're still doing our bean and money cups.  50+ days and he's still not tired of messing with those...We're on school day 68 as we start next week, but the number of the day falls a bit behind as the curriculum lines it out.  So, day 68 of school is only #55 for the number of the day.  :o)   You'll just have to trust me.  Not certain why they did it that way, but they did and we just go with it.

SCIENCE:  As I mentioned earlier, our science topic this week was rainbows.  Hands-on science - making a paper rainbow....  We talked about the trick to remembering the colors of the rainbow - Roy G. Biv - Red, organge, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet...

ART:   We looked over one of the painting in the Come With Me: Enjoying Art with Children book and answered the accompanied/suggested questions.

MUSIC:  We had our first music lesson this week as we listened to our Peter and the Wolf and other favorite works for children CD.  As we listened, we looked through a musical instruments coloring book.

I feel so blessed to be able to home school Caleb.  If there were any way to turn back time and do it all over again, I would absolutely LOVE to home school all my kids....They would think me crazy and as adults say "never!" - - but, I so wish we knew about the possibilities back in those days....

Walking with the King,
Pam

MFW 1st Grade - Week #13

BIBLE:   This week our bible stories were about The First Sin and Cain and Abel.  Caleb had to read these stories from his bible reader.  They were three and two pages, respectively....Lots of reading for a little guy.  He does it, but isn't very happy about it.  Hee hee....

Our memory verse was, "He who scorns instruction will pay for it, but he who respects a command is rewarded."   Proverbs 13:13.

And we are up to Nehemiah as we add a new book of the bible to our list every day.  Caleb can recite them through Ruth, then he starts to stumble a little.  If I let him look at our list, which he can't really read yet, but he sees the 1 & 2, then he remembers the 1 & 2 Samuels, etc...He's doing great and I'm so proud of him.

We added pictures to our timeline of Adam & Eve and Cain & Abel.

He is trying a little bit to illustrate in his bible notebook.  In the first photo, he had drawn Adam & Eve and above them is the apple with the snake near it.  ;o)

This one is of Cain and Able.  Able is standing by his home and God is sending Cain away.  Sorry, Caleb corrected me.....God is standing by the home of Cain & Abel and is sending a very sad Cain away...

Caleb learned the sound a, spelled /ai/ and /ow/ spelled ow and ou.  We had our usual rounds of diction with some of his words this week being bean, bake, same, seal, mole, main, bait, and bone...

One of his workbook pages this week was to read the sentences and illustrate pictures to go along with them.  With just a little bit of encouragement, he actually tried to draw something.  I'm so proud of him for doing that.

SCIENCE:  This week we studied stars and planets in the Things Outdoors book.  Our hands-on activity involved cutting out the planets and spacing them apart appropriately to depict how close/far they are from each other in reality.  He enjoyed doing this and we had to leave it all out on the floor until dad got home from work so he could see it also!

We also tried to do an activity with a thermometer, reading temperatures when it is close to a light bulb and then further away - BUT, we didn't have a mercury based thermometer.  So, I just showed him how the temperature changed when we touched OUR thermometer TO the light bulb and tried to explain that the closer the planet is to the sun, the warmer it will be.  The further away, the colder it will be.

MATH:  This week we worked a little bit on measurement.  Measuring to the closest inch....

We had another great hands-on activity we wanted to do, but with the holidays we just ran out of time.  It's a rather important one, so we'll probably still do it.  

I'm very excited to start next week's lesson as our next bible story is that of Noah and we get to learn about rainbows!

God bless,

Pam

MFW 1st Grade - Week #12

BIBLE/READING:   We finished our study of creation with the 6th and 7th days.   As I mentioned previously, the bible portion is getting more weighted with all the we need to do from the memory verse - "He who is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward him for what he has done."  Proverbs 19:17,  to  additional sight words, more reading from his bible reader, and the bible notebook which has journaling and illustrations.   On the heavy bible days, we're at it for 45 minutes to and hour.

Sight words were:  animals, we, will, a told, have, take, of, over, I, you, make, man, woman, them, many, rule, give, very, care, children, food, sixth, done, he, working, rested, and seventh.

Caleb learned the /ng/ sound as it sounds in the word "ring" and /e/ spelled /ea/ as in read the book.... and we introduced the word "homophone" as in words that sound the same but are spelled differently - sea and see, for example, and a couple of others you can see in the photo.

Here are our bible notebooks....Caleb's is on the left, and mine is on the right.  I love how he drew craters on his moon!!

Our big bible story for this week was reading about the Garden of Eden.

MATH:  This week we studied "place value" a little more closely.  We actually took numbers, like 54 for example; and broke it down into 5 tens, and 4 ones.  He had several worksheets and flew through those no problem.

SCIENCE: Our science this week was the study of the Volcanoes from our Things Outdoors book.  This was by far one of the coolest studies.....For our hands-on day, we had a guest teacher by the name of Sissy.

They built their volcano using the following supplies:

Caleb thought the clay looked disgusting and didn't want to touch it at first.  Ha!

But, he warmed up to the idea and helped to form the volcano.

They did a great job, didn't they!  

Here Caleb is adding food coloring......

 And baking soda......

He poured the vinegar and food coloring mixture into the volcano causing a huge eruption.

It was so much fun he had to do it MULTIPLE times!!

Thank you, Sissy, for making our volcano project the best ever!

I'm seriously behind in blogging our homeschool lessons...I'm excited that I got this week done though as I can check it off my list!!

I noticed as I look at my folders of lessons I'd prepared back at the beginning of school that we are on week #14 and I have week numbers 15 & 16 prepared, but beyond that I will have to get busy putting together our lessons.  I was so helpful to have had 16 weeks prepared in advance and ready to go.  I hope that I am able to prepare the next 16 as well......

God bless,

Pam