Curriculum Posting, Part 2: Grade 1

Okay, so let's tackle the three R's of first grade for L before moving onto the arts and sciences.

READING

Same philosophy as N in the reading department for L: just read.  L has come SO far this year with her reading skills.  She started the school year with easy readers, moved on to very short chapter books (Billie B Brown and Ivy and Bean), and has quickly progressed to more difficult and longer chapter books.  She basically takes it on as a challenge to read whatever her big sister has just finished-- Nancy Drew (3rd grade reading level!), Diary of a Wimpy Kid (4th grade reading level!) etc. etc.  She also likes the Magic Tree House series.

{Side note: one thing I have learned about homeschooling is that it's very hard to hold your younger children back.  They are constantly "listening in" when you're working with older kids, picking up so much, and even being taught by one another.  This has been true for both L and C and it's pretty cool to watch.  If the above picture is any indication, J will be following in those footsteps as well!  I have had some worries for N that she would feel behind somehow as they caught up to her, but so far she has enough that's "just hers" and I try to remember that and preserve some things.  But overall N doesn't really seem bothered by it.}

WRITING

L has been working through the Write from the Start this year, and is just starting 4-sentence paragraphs.   Before this we did lots of writing craftivities that required one- or two-sentence responses to a prompt.  I did a brief introduction to the editing process with her, also using the acronym CUPS as I did with N, although her letters stand for a slightly different set of criteria: Capitalization, Under (lower-case letters must be UNDER the middle dashed line on her ruled paper to differentiate them from capital letters), Punctuation, Spaces (make spaces between all words).  We keep her writing projects simple and fun and she seems to really enjoy it.

HANDWRITING

L is just about finished with the first grade workbook for Handwriting Without Tears:

On to the second grade book soon!  These book are simple and fun for her but good practice.

PHONICS

We are still doing the Explode the Code books; I find them so valuable for the K-2 level.  It's not just phonics practice but lots of good reinforcement in spelling, handwriting, and reading.  The pictures and sentences are so funny that all of my kiddos have loved working on these books.

Because L does 2-3 pages per day we have finished both books 2 and 3 this year.

GRAMMAR

We haven't done much, other than The Sentence Family with N like I talked about in the grade 3 post.  As I said before, she's absorbing a lot of concepts beyond her grade level simply because she is in the room when I'm teaching N using things like Schoolhouse Rock videos.

For reinforcement with the concepts that she *does* need to know for grade 1, I have loved these no-prep packets-- I didn't purchase the whole bundle but just a few of the seasonal ones around Halloween, Christmas, etc.  The worksheets offered good reinforcement for L and she enjoyed the fun pictures and activities.  We did some of the math portions as well.

SPELLING

She gets a lot of the spelling she needs through Explode the Code but I have also imported some first grade lists into Spelling City and she has been slowly working through those.  She does love the games and this is one of her favorite things to do.  The first grade lists I found are pretty comprehensive and so I'm taking my time with them too; we may work on them in the summer, we might not.

MATH

We started the year using Splash Math for L, and she really enjoyed it for most of the year.  After a while, however, she started begging to use Khan Academy like N (must be like big sister).  She was pretty much finished with grade 1 in Splash Math when we started Khan about two months ago.  She was so excited about it that she finished first grade math on Khan in about three weeks.

L also does XtraMath for math facts fluency (also talked about this a lot in the grade 3 post) and she's coming right along with addition.  She really didn't care much for this at first but she has now completely changed her tune-- she feels really confident with it and it's often the first thing that she picks to do.

Need I mention that L also learned a lot of the skip counting songs (see grade 3 post again) and now knows about half her multiplication tables too??  Like I said, tough to hold these young'ens back.

I guess that about does it for L!  Be back soon with all the artsy subjects :)