Our first month- done!

We finished our first month of homeschool first grade! Here is our wall calendar. Every day we put up the number and talk about the date. Even Noah sings the months of the year song! 

We had 22 days of school in September. 

Here is how we showed it in our daily math activity. 

We also make a tally mark for each day. This is in Connor's daily calendar notebook he has. We do this every morning. We also practice skip counting by 5's with the tally marks.

He also writes the number of days of school in his notebook. 

And here is the calendar Connor keeps in his morning notebook we do everyday. 

Connor has a journal with pages that prompt him with a question to answer. The journals are just fun ways to get him thinking about things, to practice handwriting, answering in complete sentences, punctuation and capitalization. 

The bottom one is a picture of Connor next to his birthday cake (up on a table with six candles) and our minivan because we took a trip to Mimi and papa's house over the summer. Not sure why he wrote the letter "a" the way he did (?) ha ha! 

In the top journal entry, he shouted "build train tracks" as his answer to the question. I encouraged him to answer it in a complete sentence, to which he replied "I like to build tracks after school!"

See how sometimes he just draws with one color crayon? He is not always a fan of coloring pictures. So it totally shocked me when he decided to color the title page the way he did! He told me he used all the colors of the rainbow! 

Sh- ship, and picnics

In school today, we did another reading activity to solidify knowing and reading the "sh" sound. We cut out a "ship book" to remember "sh as in ship" and wrote some words on it. 

We talk about how vowels "stick" the words together and on some worksheets we mark them with a red "smile" on top, and then underline our consonants and consonant blends with a black pencil.

Here is one thing I love about homeschooling during these younger years: 

Connor gets to kiss and love Lainey, and he showed her different countries on the globe. Noah played with play dough today but didn't want his picture taken.

Lunch picnic in the front yard, in a box! Followed by bike riding and a nature walk collecting leaves. I love that my kids get to do this together. (Now mommy wishes she could have a nap!)

Who ate my cheese!?

Today we played a little reading game of sh and ch word blends. Connor cut out words on a piece of cheese (paper) and we took turns having the mouse pick up a piece of cheese and read the word. If we read the word right, the mouse got to eat it, if we read it wrong, we had to put it back in the pile. Connor loved this game! He really likes to play games!

Daily math activity

Here is an example of our daily number of the day math activity! As we discussed 10+5=15, I then took 10 items and said "what is half of ten?" And we divided a line in the middle with 5 items on each side. Connor said "so, 5 is half of 10, and 5+5=10, just like 3+3=6 and 2+2=4" yay! 

Today we added a penny to our coin cup and since we had 5 pennies, he got to trade it in for a nickel. So now he has a nickel and dime. 

Daily math activity

Everyday, we count the number of days that we have school. Today was the 12th day. Connor has a chart that he writes the number on, another chart where he makes a tally mark (and then adds it up for the month), and then we do a little activity. We have 3 cups. One is a coin cup. Every day he drops a penny in the cup. When we reach 5, he trades his penny in for a nickel, then we continue with more pennies, and when we reach 10, he trades it infor a dime. We currently have a dime and two pennies to represent 12 days of school.

We also have a bean cup for place value. We have a "ones" cup and a "tens" cup so far. Everyday, Connor drops a bean in our ones cup. When we reached 10, we glued them onto a Popsicle stick to make 10, and put it in the "tens" cup. Then we continue to add one bean per day in the ones cup. When we reach 20 days of school, we will have two sticks in the tens cup. We also have number cards to show how it all comes together. Here is a picture from yesterday: 

From here, we show how place value works. And even though we did place value last year, it was fun to see it click again as he described it to me and even went on to say "100 has 3 spots! And one thousand has 4 spots!" He made me show him how many spots one million has! And then he excitedly asked me if could count to one hundred by himself (which he did). After this, we then use the number cards to show and write an addition equation: 10+1=11. This daily math activity just helps solidify understanding of numbers and how it all comes together! It takes time and it's separate from our regular math lesson, but I can really see it helping him!

Our local homeschool group

We met with our homeschooling group today! So excited and blessed to have this group- kids to play with and mommies to talk to! Connor had fun making friends! 

Our first week!

This is how we do school! 

Even Noah is learning!

We get to have picnic lunches together and explore God's beautiful world. Science this week was about things "on the ground" (tree roots, earth worms, etc). We collected a big bag of green acorns. A few days later, during our observation, they turned brown. We decided because they weren't getting water from the tree anymore. Connor decided to return them back to nature for the squirrels.

Spelling and stamping words on play dough using abc stamps!

Reading review of words already learned- Connor reads the words on the cards, then using ziggy the puppet he places an apple eraser on the word once it has been read.

We love hands-on learning.