The End of the Beginning

I have officially declared that last week was our last week of First Grade.  Yea!  We all survived!  Unfortunately, it did not end on quite the note I was planning.  We finished off this year with nature studies.  I wanted Grant, and Johanna since, you know, she's always there too, to learn a little more about our native plants and animals.  I did this through a story.  I made up a story which I started telling on Monday while we were walking on one of our woodland trails.  Sidenote:  On our walk we found this cool red mushroom, and Grant was trying to make it rain (not that we needed any more!) by shaking the water from one of the trees. 

The main characters of my story were a family of raccoons.  In the story I talked about what raccoons looks like, where they live, what they like to eat (which is just about anything), and how they go about their days, and mostly their nights.  I talked about how they are mischievous, curious creatures, and they got into all kind of trouble in my story.  I talked about them making their home in a hollow oak tree, and how they like to sleep up in the trees during the day.  I described oak trees, and then we took some leaf samples back the to school room and Grant did some leaf rubbings in his lesson book.  We discovered that we actually have quite a few different species of oaks on our property, along with lots of shagbark hickory trees.  Even though we live on Pin Oak Road, the majority of our trees are white oaks.

Our school day was "cancelled" Tuesday because I took Kitty Man, and Mia, to the vet.  That became a whole morning affair.  I received some bad news about Kitty Man, so we'll see if he hangs in there for a little while longer.

On Wednesday, I introduced some new characters into the story as we were sitting outside near our pond.  The raccoon brother twins went to the pond to visit their friends, Mickey and Jerry muskrat.  The kids learned more details about muskrats.  When we got into the school room, we did the penny whistle lesson, reviewed math with bean bag tosses, and then we did a "form drawing" of how Mickey muskrat might swim around in the pond.  After the drawing, Grant copied a short sentence, and then we ended that school day with some reading.

I knew we wouldn't be having school on Thursday, because the kids and I were going to be picking Kitty Man up from the vet.  So, when I told Grant on Wednesday that it was the last day of First Grade, I thought he would be happy and excited (since according to him it was the worst thing in the world), but he was actually a little sad.

So, we didn't cover everything I would have liked to this week, but hopefully Grant knows more about raccoons and muskrats and can identify a few different kind of oak trees now.  Maybe????