Letter Review

This past week in school we reviewed the letters, both upper and lower case using a story about a King who could not read or write and had to have scribes chisel words into stone tablets.  On top of this, they didn't use any vowels.  Once he went to battle, and he needed more soldiers so he sent the above message back to his castle.  After many guesses the scribes figured out that it said, "PLEASE SEND HELP AND SOLDIERS."   The soldiers were sent, and the battle was won.  Now the scribes had the task of figuring out a better and faster way to write.  They came up with lower case letters, and they decided to etch into sheets of beeswax instead of stone tablets.

We divided up the alphabet between the four school days, and did a thorough review of each letter.  Grant walked each letter out on the floor, then he wrote them in the air with his finger, hand, and arm.  As he did this we talked about the sound that each letter makes, and came up with some words that started with that letter.  After that he practiced writing them a few times on his chalkboard before writing them in the "scroll".  When we went outside, I wrote the upper-case letter on the driveway with chalk, and he wrote the matching lower-case letter, or vice versa.  After we had them written out, we walked over each of them following the chalk lines. 

Writing the letters on the "scroll":

In addition to the letter review, we continued to review skip counting and Spanish with bean bag tosses and singing, and as always, included penny whistle lessons (He can now play Mary Had a Little Lamb.  Woo-hoo!), and reading everyday.

The end of first grade is now in sight!  I think we will do one more week of "nature studies" next week, and spend a lot of time outside exploring all that is going on around us in the beautiful countryside of Truxton, MO.

O is For Olympics

On Monday morning, the kids played outside for awhile, enjoying the cold, but sunny day.  Grant and Johanna drew a nice picture on the driveway with some new sidewalk chalk, Grant raced around on his hot wheel and bike, and the girls found the big puddle in the driveway and spent most of their time there.

We also had some visitors on the pond.

Once we made it into the school room, the kids were introduced to Paco the Parrot.  He is going to help me teach Grant (and Johanna, too) Spanish.  The kids really like him and everyone wanted to play with him.  All at the same time of course.  We will start introducing Spanish songs into our circle time during school, and a few Spanish words into our day.  We will keep it very simple to start with.

I read Grant the story Old Turtle and we talked about the letter O and the sounds it makes.  He practiced writing it and we drew a picture from the story.  He also read another simple book.

We drew our turtles under an Olive tree.  Grant's turtle is eating an olive.

We have been watching a lot of the winter olympics, and in the afternoon we watched Apollo Anton Ohno in a speed skating race.  I started making dinner soon afterward, and the next thing I know, I turn around and Grant is wearing a white t-shirt on which he wrote USA, and his bike helmet.  He is now a speed skater and begins "skating" in his socks around the kitchen. He won lots of gold medals that evening!

On Tuesday, we reviewed the story of the Old Turtle, wrote down a list of O words, and made up this silly sentence: A dog and a fox in socks were hot.

There was also plenty of speed skating going on in the school room as Grant got Johanna in on the action.  Grant was Apollo, Johanna was "Goergle" (a woman downhill skier) and the little rubby ducky was J.R. Selsky.  Grant was kind enough to let Johanna "win" at least one gold medal.  Unfortunately, J.R. was shut out of the medals.

 Julia enjoyed playing tea party while all this was going on.

In fact, as I am typing this Grant is skating in an imaginary race in the kitchen.  He is also his own announcer.  It sounds like someone has been disqualified.....
Before the night was over he had won 13 gold medals.

On Wednesday, we woke up to a very cold, but sunny day.  We all suited up and went outside to play and take our walk.  As we were walking across our front yard, we saw a robin hopping around on the ground.  I was surprised to see it since it was so cold, but it is a sure sign of Spring, warmer weather, and less outerwear!

In school, Grant learned about the letter U.  I told him the story The Wonderful Musician. 
He wrote the letter U and we drew a picture from a different short verse in our lesson book. 

U is a gnome's UMBRELLA
UNDER a mushroom he hids
UP on top the rain comes down
But it's dry UNDER "U" inside

Our mushrooms are upside down U's.

Julia didn't do any speedskating, but thought it was fun to wear the helmet for a few minutes.

The rocking horse in the room also got a chance to try on a helmet.

On Thursday, Grant re-told me the story, wrote the letter U in his lesson book, read a little bit, and helped me make up two silly "U" sentences:
A puppy runs up a hill under the sun for fun.
A hunter put gum in his fake gun and fired for fun.

Then I finished telling the container story with Katie who has now received the "gift of knowledge", and that ended our alphabet "block".  Grant has now learned all the letters, and we will be doing a lot of reading practice.

On Friday we had co-op.  I taught the circulatory system this time.  We also had some very special visitors come to stay with us from Iowa.  Cory's brother, his wife, and their two kids.  The weekend was really busy, and went by fast, but the kids had a great time.