Reading Readiness

Caleb is now working through Teaching Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and is making great progress. He has his lesson first thing in the morning while Cooper practices violin and Noah reads an assigned book. This new schedule has been working well!
The rest of his school day is spent doing various activities. Many of these are independent so that he can work while I do lessons with his brothers.

Caleb was proud of his work on his Read, Build, Write mat.

I recently made playdoh mats for each letter of the alphabet. He loves them.

The Read, Build, Write mats and Playdoh mats can be found at Homeschool Creations.

Thursday School: Trees in Spring and French Brunch

After Davinia's lesson on trees in spring, students compiled a booklet with information related to four common British trees. 

Noah was SO diligent in finding and writing information about each tree on his fact pages.

 We had our second annual French brunch. So much fun and oh so yummy.

Each of the kids decorated a French-themed placemat while waiting for everyone to be served.

Each child requested various foods and drinks in French. Maeva asks Caleb, "Qu'est-ce que tu vourdrez?"

Knights

During our history study of knights and samurai, each boy designed a Coat of Arms.

School in the States

Our trip to the States was too long to abandon our normal school routine. Over the seven weeks, we were able to do 15 days of school work as well as some fun field trips.

Our first field trip was to the Aquarium of the Americas in Atlanta. Amazing! We arrived just after 10am and didn't leave until after 4pm. The boys loved every minute. The pictures are sadly of a very poor quality. Nick needed our camera for his work in the museum, so we used a disposable.

Penguins!

Whale Shark! The sharks, manta rays, and dolphins were among our favorites.

We spent a lot of time at this touch pool.

Great day!

Gigi helped Caleb while I worked with the older boys.

The boys joined Aunt Ginger's painting class.

Here's Caleb's masterpiece.

 Our second field trip was to the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport. The tour was intimate with only one other couple joining us.

Touch pool in the Discovery Room.

Horseshoe crab - He was a favorite.

This guy was seriously aggressive.

Sifting through the sand for a shark tooth in the fossil dig.

We each matched our fossil with the appropriate animal.

Up close with the dolphins.

Our final field trip was to Fort Conde.

Running on the grounds.

Imprisoned.

The tunnel below the fort.

Pre-States Trip

I was really busy leading up to our 7 week States trip, and posting pictures was not a high priority. School went on as usual until the day before departure. Here's a snippet of our work:

Science: Identifying matter attracted to magnets

Can a magnet attract through plastic?

Can a magnet attract through glass?

 Kirsty did a fantastic lesson on birds.

British birds - Color by number

Painting a Robin

We found the mass of pebbles using our balance bucket and hexagrams.

2011-2012 Curriculum

Yes, I'm just now updating our curriculum pages from last year. This post is a record of curriculum we used for the 2011-2012 school year for students in first grade and kindergarten. Check out the resource pages on the right side of the blog soon for what we've been using this year.

History

We studied Ancient Times, using The Story of the World as our primary text.

Check it out here.

There are some great activities in this book.

View here.

Science:
We used Nancy Larson Science 1 last year. I'm really pleased with this program! 

You can view the tool kit, samples of the workbooks, and purchase here.

  

Math:

Noah completed Saxon Math 1.

Cooper completed Saxon Math 2.

 Music:

We focused on composers from various periods.

This was our primary text.

Geography:

View here.

Language Arts:

This was our primary text for reading/phonics. 

This was our primary text for language work including grammar.

We used All About Spelling.

Noah used this workbook.

Cooper used this workbook which can be found here.

Literature:

and all of the books covered in the guide (Madeline, Nate the Great, Nate the Great and the Lost List, Miss Nelson is Missing!, The Biggest Bear, A New Coat for Anna, Stone Soup, Mr. Putter and Tabby Pour the Tea, Henry and Mudge, Little Bear, Little Bear's Friend, Amelia Bedelia, Peter Rabbit, and The Emperor's New Clothes).
Buy it here.

  
Bible:

This is a great pack of Scripture verses (ESV) that the boys are memorizing.

They can be purchased here.

Our copy was purchased at the First Presbyterian Church, Jackson Bookstore. 

Art:

This book will be our guide.

We supplemented with biographical books about the artist being studied, samples of his work, etc. We continued to use the book below.

View here.

French:
The boys joined several other children for a weekly French class with a native-speaker for a teacher. We supplemented with the resources below.  

 

    

Wagner

We listened to Ride of the Valkyries while coloring a picture of Wagner from our Dover Coloring Book.

Enthralled.