Weekly Wrap Up #15...

This week in first grade...

In Poetry..
Poem of the month~  We are getting to the final stages of memorizing this poem.  It seems to be trickier than others, in part I think, because of it's repetitive nature.  Now they just have to get the order of the verse right.
Poem of the week~ talks about making treats for winter animals in your backyard forest.  Now my children are very interested in what we can do for our backyard visitors.
Our silly poem~ Was the story of the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.  I preferred the wording in the book we already owned, so I read from that.  Ava chose to draw this week, which we both thought was a nice change of pace.

In Social Studies....

We started the week talking about Martin Luther King.  This lead to a lot of conversations that I'd been putting off until now, ie, slavery, racism, and assassination.  We watched a little bit of the Dream Speech and talked about how things have changed over the years.  My babies were already familiar with the need to protect civil rights, but this was the first time they had heard how bad things have been in our country.  Following MLK we continued our talk about the birth of our nation.   We read a few stories of our earliest presidents, and read how some of our patriotic songs came to be.  Again I used this as a guide, and added a few other story books, and resources.

 

In the Kitchen..
We were supposed to make playdough, but things got in the way.  Fun things like rockets!

In Music...

After we talked about the history of our patriotic songs in social studies, we explored how music influences art.  We focused on the Star Spangled Banner this week because this song is so very familiar to my baseball loving family.  I asked them to choose a line from the song, and then to paint it.  The each chose "...rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air..."

(as I write this it occurs to me that taken out of context these little paintings could look very unpatriotic.  Whoopsie.)

In Art..
We made tea dyed paper to create our very own "old paper".  Ava, Cyrus and Sol went pretty crazy for this.  It's very simple, with pretty instant results.

In Art Study..

We explored J.M.W. Turner's Burning of the House of Parliament.  Ava thought this painting was both kinda cool, and kinda scary.  She said that it seemed like a creepy place to be, and that it felt unsafe.   I agree with her. 

In Science We..
Made more crystals!  These clear crystals took longer to form (12-24 hours), are smaller, and have larger lattice structure.  They are my favorite so far, Ava likes them "medium".

In Math We... 
We worked on adding 4-place digits using the base-10 cards.  One of the many reasons that I LOVE this math program.  My little girl added 3946+2108, 2834+5781, 2475+3645, and four other equations this week.  It's pretty cool to watch her work them out.

This week spilled into the weekend again, which is why I'm posting it late again.  I'm cool with that.  It was a good week of good school.  We are working on a new system inspired by this post.  I'm not going full work box, that wouldn't make sense for us.  Maybe I really just like the little calenders.  Next year we'll be adding Cyrus to the mix as a kindergartener.  I find myself spending a lot of spare time trying to work out the easiest way to transition to two kids in homeschool.  I'm excited and more than a little nervous to see how it's all going to work out.  (yes, I realize that I still have 8-9 months before the next school year starts for us.  I'm a planner.)