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.