Sep. 4, 2007 - First Day of School
We started school today. Locally, students have been in school since 15 Aug for the Catholic school and 20 Aug for the public schools. I always thought school started in September (It did growing up and also in Virginia where we lived a few months ago) so that's when we started.
Mary read Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth.” She had no problem reading this. We have divided out beginning into syllables for her before, now she can read it on her own without the syllable division help.
Then, I read to both Mary and David from Genesis 1 & 2 from “The Rhyme Bible.” It is amazingly Biblically accurate for its grade level and rhyme patterns, and has nice pictures, too.
After that, Mary and I worked on letter sounds with David.
Then, David played with trains from a box of toys that has been put up for a while.
Mary worked on her 1 addition facts. She has trouble with the “hard” ones, 1+5, 1+6, 1+7…Jeff and I joke that she’s going to score 1000 on her SATs, 200 on Math and 800 on English.
Then, we had a short break, memorizing the “hard” ones made her tired.
Now, it was on to reading/writing/spelling with Webster. We worked through Lesson 1 and 2 of the syllabary, I formatted them with a larger font size than Don Potter's Excellent Version of Webster. I also made them in all uppercase--we're working in all uppercase until she has B and D firmly in her mind. Also, uppercase letters are easier to write legibly. (She does know her lowercase and can read from that perfectly, in fact, Genesis 1:1 was in lowercase.) She did very well on them, although I had to keep correcting her about using long a instead of the a in ma--I had explained that these were syllables and in syllables, a has its long sound. As examples, I showed her BA BY and DA VID. After we finished reading the syllabary lesson, I had her go down and do just all the a's again (BA, CA, DA, FA, KA, GA, HA, MA, NA, RA, TA, WA.) MA and DA are especially hard for her to say with the long a sound. She also had a bit of trouble with soft c (CE, CI, CY.)
Then, I wrote BA BE BI BO BU BY and had her copy it neatly, saying the sounds as she wrote. Then, I dictated HA HE HI HO HU HY, sounding out for her only the 2 or 3 she couldn't figure out how to spell on her own. She did a great job figuring most of them out on her own.
One more break.
Then, science. I read about butterflies from A Beka Grade 2 Enjoying God's World Science Reader. I learned a few things myself, like the difference between a moth and a butterfly (a moth rests with its wings flat, a butterfly with its wings together. Butterflies have a chrysalis, moths a silk cocoon. Moths have thicker wings than butterflies. One fact I did know: moths generally fly at night, butterflies during the day.)
Then art. David got to do art, too. We painted butterflies using coloring sheets from primarygames.com. My artistic talents are very low, Mary's butterfly looked better than mine. Mine did look better than David's, however!
