Showing posts with label first grade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label first grade. Show all posts

Friday, April 22, 2011

MFW 1st: Week 28

Another full week for us in anticipation of Easter break next week with Grammy (and a tonscilectomy ... bleh). Like I mentioned before, my goal was to get through Day 125 before Easter so that we could start on May 2nd with Day 126, which lands our Exploration Day on Fridays. Much better for our crew.

Today (Friday) we will be making a neat Jonah craft, meeting up with Pagoo, and tackling much-neglected science experiments. Next week, on our break, we will still have a Proverb to learn and apply (Proverbs 10:9) and we will do one science experiment per day. We are nearly finished with our read-aloud, The Doll People, and we are ridiculously excited to be moving on to Mr Popper's Penguins during our quiet week, as well.

To recap our awesome week in which we said goodbye (for now) to the Old Testament ...

Bible History

Jonah! What child does not love the story of Jonah and the whale? It was such fun digging deeper into the story and learning about what made Jonah a prophet of God.













I found the most darling used book called The Man Caught By a Fish by Brem and I have a neat art project planned for our lazy Friday. The whale is depicted in this book as a giant goldfish and the story is awfully endearing.



We witnessed as God allowed the enemy to capture Israel and take his people as prisoners to Babylon. Oh how this made Sugar upset!



For two reasons Sugar loved the story of The Fiery Furnace. 1) She loved saying "Nebuchadnezzar". 2) She loved the image in her mind of the angel of God in the furnace with the three Jews. When deciding how to illustrate her Bible notebook, she opted for only showing the fiery furnace, as she felt that the image of the angel was too heavenly to put onto paper. She is so sensitive and intuitive.







Even Bugs was riveted by the story of Daniel and the Lions. Another special story of faith in God and in his mighty plans. On a separate note, I'm really eager to see the new big cat movie by Disney and I am pretty certain my kids will be enthralled. Some of our most favorite conversation relates to faith, being faithful, God's faithfulness, and providence, especially as we continue to wait with utter faith that His timing is perfect and that we are called to demonstrate our unwavering faith to those around us. We surely try to these sweet Bible stories really echo our daily adoption walk.





Queen Esther. So beautiful, clever, and full of heart for her people. (Here's my very own Queen Esther, complete with our homemade crown with our homemade jewels from our lesson on King Solomon).





When Grammy is here next week we will have a little Purim celebration (yes, we know that was in March) complete with Hamantaschen cookies. Mmm.

What we took most of all from the story of Esther was how fervently and intentionally she prayed before doing anything. Excellent lesson. She also reminds us to always be a voice for the voiceless and to use our gifts and place in life to stand up when others cannot. Sugar loved this story so very much.

As our Old Testament journey came to a close, we finished with the Jews returning home, to Jerusalem. Beautiful.



Our timeline is gorgeous (if I do say so) ... it really came together and wow does Sugar feel a sense of accomplishment seeing all that she discovered thus far. It has been incredibly useful to all of us ... we read from the Bible nightly and the girls hop up often to see when things happened in relation to the Bible we learned in the Old Testament with MFW.



Copywork

[caption id="attachment_603" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. --Proverbs 25:21"][/caption]

Reading

This week Sugar was introduced to irregular plurals (man ... men), antonyms, and infrequent sound-spelling variations.









Sugar continues to read aloud to me for 15 minutes per day, and I read aloud to all three for 30 minutes per day. Language Arts take a 180-turn come the week after our Easter break. I can hardly wait for the fresh changes to our lessons.

Math

Sugar completed Singapore 1A!!! She breezes through most math, and I have to reiterate that I believe this stems from her early exposure (first semester of first grade) to Miquon math and Cuisenaire rods. We get to crack open Singapore 1B after Easter break ... pretty fabulous how refreshing our start to school will be after our little break.

This week was spent on shapes and measurement. I think that she was happy for the departure from addition and subtraction for a bit.







Sparkler and Bugsy are always in the mix ... learning, laughing, making messes, and having cookies.









Art

Isn't doodling and drawing on a chalkboard the.best.ever? Sugar thinks so. She feels very teacher-ly, I suppose. :)





Kattie at 2ladybugsandalizard is hosting this week's MFW linkup. It's always enlightening reading and learning from other MFW homeschool families. Enjoy!

Because of Him.