Our First Week of School 2013-2014 School Year

We started back to school on August 19th, but I have not had time to post anything. I started this post that week, but never completed it. I am sharing it now to share what we have been doing.

Week of Aug 19th:
We have slowly been easing back into our normal routine this week, though I have made some changes that I hope will keep me more organized and less stressed this year. We are almost halfway through My Father's World K and have started back in at the unit G: Goat.

Even though the children know most of last year's Words to Remember by heart, I am having them review them, 2 per week, by having them put the words in order and then adding them to their notebooks (something new we are trying this year).

I decided to use all the colors of the rainbow to remind us of God's faithfulness.

When each page is complete it goes into a page protector in the back of the notebook.

They are using their calendar notebooks daily. (Edited: we started out with these notebooks, but the girls were finding them too confusing. We have set them aside and will be starting them back up again soon.) If we don't have lesson time they still fill in the calendar and the weather. However, if we do have lesson time they do all the daily pages in their calendar notebook. I got these great Kindergarten notebook pages from Mama's Learning Corner. She also has preschool notebook pages. 

The month's calendar is stored  in the front pocket of the binder (though she puts hers in a page protector). As we are starting part way through the month, I filled in the dates up through 18. The girls will be filling in their own calendars from now on.

This daily sheet is in a page protector and the girls circle what day it is today, what day it will be tomorrow, what the date is in numbers and in words/numbers, what the season is, and what day of school it is.

(Please excuse the unreadable blue marker. We didn't realize we shouldn't use washable dry-erase markers. Lesson learned.)

They also get to work on the time each day. They have to go see what the time is and then fill in the analog clock and write the time.

They fill in the weather daily to be used at the end of the month to fill in a weather graph.

They count the days we are in school with tally marks.

And each month they write their name so we can see how they progress through the year.

This week we focused on our G: Goat unit. Our words to remember are:

Jesus died for my sins.

Tabitha was in charge of holding the word cards this week, helping to sound out the words.

The girls colored and cut out their picture cards from their the MFW student pages and Hannah and Harold have the ones I have from doing Letter of the Week.

The first 3 units are focused on Farm animals. 

The girls had to match adult animals to their babies, and we also used them for a matching game.

They also made puppets on sticks.

Then they are supposed to cut and glue the correct word to match the picture. This is really too easy for the girls as they can already read the words, so we use it for writing practice.

Each week we will have a math sheet from MFW. This first week we were working on telling time. 

As the girls can already tell time to the hour I had them answer some questions so they had to add or subtract 1 or 2 hours to find the time.

We even made Green playdough.

And mommy made Glasses.

Hannah has been working on cutting. I had her try straws, but that was a little tricky, so she then practiced cutting paper strips.

She is also working on her Letter Book, but I will share that in a later post.

The girls have also been learning cursive. We are reviewing the Logic of English's Rhythm of Handwriting Cursive curriculum. 

As you can see, our first week was quite busy. I will go into some more detail about what we have been doing in our last few units, plus more information about the letter books Hannah has been making, in a later post. I also plan to share some of the activities I have been doing with Hannah and Harold, plus more details about our workbox system.

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