Last night as I was getting the kids ready to pray, before bed, my oldest asked me when he could do some "first grade stuff."  This was a bit confusing to me, because he already reads the science book to the two younger ones and has started reading a children's history book (no pictures) about 5-7 pages a day. And he may do the same math as his sister, but it is technically the first grade level. We don't want to make a big issue out of grade levels, though we do say that he is in 1st grade and his sister in kindergarten, but I would like to continue to do some of their subjects together without someone feeling bad because they think they're "behind." 

So,  I said that we could talk about it in a minute and went on to pray with the kids. After I sent the other two up to get in their beds (I was nursing the youngest, so we had prayed downstairs), I turned to him and asked what he meant by "first grade stuff." Did he think that the work he was doing now wasn't hard enough? He said that he wanted to do something harder than phonics. "Well, on the days that you have that page full of sentences that you have to write, how many phonics pages do you think you should do?", I said. He thought he should only do one page those days (that's what I thought!), but on the days that he had easy phonics pages, he thought 6 or 7 pages would be good. :)  So he and I talked a little longer about what he would like to do, and we figured out that he really likes informational type books with pictures. you probably know what kinds of books I'm referring to, the kind that has the different pictures all around the pages and has lots of little words telling all kinds of cool information about the subjects in the pictures. He has a book kind of like that on dinosaurs, one on alligators and crocodiles (both have some pretty heavy information in them and he just drinks this stuff up!) and recently we were given a book called My First Atlas. Because of this newest addition to our book collection he now knows what most countries flags look like (and those are just the the pages inside the front and back covers).

We decided that he would start reading through the atlas book (it teaches not only about different parts of the world, but how to read a map and a lot more) and after he gets done reading the page for the day, he would come to me and tell me 5 things he learned. One thing I talked to him about, was that if he has another book for school, he'll be doing school longer than Jenna. He thought that'd be OK, "'cause it would be more like first grade." We'll see how all of this goes. :)