Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Revised - 1st Grade Completion Planning

I've done a lot of thinking and reading lately and decided to hold off on finishing Saxon Math 2 this summer.  Even though it is K's best subject and she has no issues with it, I didn't want to be in Saxon 3 at the start of 2nd grade and then move her on too quickly.  I would rather cement in her the basics, to where she knows them like the back of her hand, so to speak.  Repetition is a good teacher!  So she is doing her Saxon 1 math fact cards 3 times a week along with the back of the worksheets in Saxon 2.  We never do the backs of the worksheets but I thought it was good review for her to make sure she knows the concepts before we move on.  I also plan moving on very slowly, instead of doing 2-3 lessons a day, I want to just do one lesson at a time and do both sides of the worksheet like suggested, once in the morning and then the back of it in the evening to make sure those concepts are really sticking.

With grammar, we are almost finished with the parts in Rod and Staff English 2 that are review for us and I don't plan on teaching new material from the book, such as adjectives, paragraphs, etc.  We will save those for a review after she learns them this year in FLL 2.  However, I do want her to finish the last unit that is on alphabetical order and dictionary skills because she is very interested right now in what words mean and how to use a dictionary.  R&S English 2 is great review or extra practice work for FLL.

We will finish up SOTW 1 by the end of August or possibly sooner.  I've learned that saving history or science for the end of the school day is a big mistake with K!  She is so tired and almost falls asleep during the lesson.  However, if we do it as one of the first subjects of the day, she is alert and remembers more and its not like pulling teeth for me lol.  So, our schedule is changing and more on that later.

Oh science, how I loathe thee!  I really have been slacking in science as we still have 2 lessons on the human body to finish and the whole animal book to complete by the end of August.  Our plant study was reading and learning about plants and doing a vegetable garden, which surprisingly is doing exceptionally well.  I think the hands-on aspect with the garden really helped her understand plants more than reading it in a book.

We will finish up writing sometime in mid-August.  She pretty much gets it and I feel like moving on and not finishing all the lessons in WWE 1 but I really like to finish things, so we are going to do so.  I'm amazed at how K can narrate, understand and form her own sentences now.  The program really works and I love that it uses classics and not some little passage from a book that isn't good quality.

Spelling is our big subject lately as K is starting to have trouble spelling words out of SWO B.  We are keeping a "trouble words" list and re-testing once a week on those words and then she is playing games with those words on Spelling City.  With AAS 2, it is going really well and she gets all the words correct usually and even gets them correct in review tests!  Looks like we will finish SWO B by the end of August and AAS 2 is behind schedule, so we will probably carry it over into the start of 2nd grade and finish it sometime in October.

K does a lot of crafts and artsy stuff in her free time by her own choosing, but as far as the art curriculum we are moving at a snail's pace.  It just isn't on my priority list but I hope to incorporate it more into our week this coming year.

With piano, K is doing well and she is going to be beginning violin lessons along with her piano lessons.  We will see how that goes and which instrument she wants to play more and will concentrate on.

If everything goes as planned, we will finish this school year on August 26th.  I don't plan on starting 2nd grade until September 19th, so K will have a lot of time off between there.  She gets 2 weeks off this month (July), so that is plenty of time to enjoy summer!

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