Posted in The Story About Ping
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I think we had a good start today!
We got started right at 10:00 and did the first lesson in Leading Little Ones To God by Marian M. Schoolland. The lesson was about "faith" and how that means believing in something we can't see.
Then, we moved into reading The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack for the first time. DS loved it! He kept asking, "And what happened next!?"
After we read the story, we talked about how sometimes things look like a good thing, but really they're not. Just like Ping went after the rice cake crumb trail, but got snatched up by a boy whose family wanted to eat him for dinner! We talked about "Stranger Danger" and how sometimes bad people try to give little kids things that look good so that they can grab them and take them away from their parents. How do you teach this without scaring your children to death?
Then, we read about Solomon in 1 Kings 3:9 and we said a prayer asking God for a discerning heart, the wisdom to know what is right and what is wrong.
We decided after this "hefty" discussion to move onto something a little more light hearted, so we delved into art. We talked about how colored pencils were the medium used to draw the illustrations in the book. We examined the pictures carefully to see how the illustrator, Kurt Wiese, used combinations of colors to create different colors and shades. We made a fun discovery through our observations: It looks like he only used red, blue, and yellow pencils throughout the whole book, but with different combinations of these colors, he created green, orange, and even different shades of brown! Fun!
We took this a step further and got out our own colored pencils. Just using red, blue, and yellow, DS drew a picture of SpongeBob Squarepants, and was so excited when he figured out how to make brown!
For language arts, I had DS write his own short story that began with "Once Upon A Time". He decided to make his story correspond with his picture, so he wrote about...what else?...SpongeBob Squarepants! Ha! Can you tell he's 6?
His story went like this:
SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS: THE HASH-SIGHING SLASHER
"Once upon a time there was a little sponge name SpongeBob and he works at the Krusty Krab and Squidworth told a story about the Hash-Sighing Slasher. It was about the light was turning on and off. The End"
Okay, so when I said "short" story, he took that very literally! It was supposed to be "hash-slinging", not "hash-sighing", but at least he knew what he meant. He took this straight from a SpongeBob episode, so you may recognize where he was coming from if you happen to have a son this age!
When he writes, he still doesn't leave spaces between his words (although we've been working on this for months) and he wants to write in all capital letters (because that's easier), so I let him get away with it when he writes a story (for now), but we're working on these things in Penmanship.
Actually, that moves us into Penmanship. I was so excited because we just happened to get our Draw Write Now: Book 1 by Marie Hablitzel and Kim Stitzer in the mail right before it was time to move onto handwriting practice! I love these books and have been wanting to order one for some time, so I finally just bit the bullet and did it! I wasn't disappointed and DS loved his first lesson (well, half of it!)
I started out by letting him find the "duck" page and he practiced drawing ducks for about 15 minutes. He loved how it showed him step-by-step how to draw and it made it easy for him to copy. Then, I got out the work book that came with the instructional book and asked him to copy the first two sentences into the workbook. They were:
"Ducks like the water." "They swim in it."
DS hates writing when he has to follow the rules and do it correctly, so I stopped there and we'll do the next two sentences tomorrow. Then, he asked if he could draw the picture at the top, which is what I was going to have him do anyway, so he started on that. After about 10 minutes he got frustrated because colored pencils don't have the "coverage" that crayons do. Well, we'll finish that tomorrow, too!
At this point we took a much-needed break for lunch.
After lunch, I gave him some free time and then we delved into Science. Today we decided to learn about "Water Safety". I just happened to have the Health, Safety, and Manners 1 book from A Beka, so we read pgs.51 & 52 entitled Safety in the Water. Then, we made this chart and hung it on our school room wall:
DS cut out pictures of water and water-related things in old Highlights magazines and added some stickers to decorate the poster. I still think that good old-fashioned cutting and pasting is an excellent way to work on fine-motor skills.
Now we decided to snuggle up on the couch for his reading practice. I have an old Dick and Jane beginning reader textbook called Friends Old And New that has about 40 short stories in it that we will be working through for his reading. When we finish that, we'll move onto something a little more challenging. Today we read the first story, The Lost and Found Tree. He grumbled about it at first, but at the end, he said he couldn't wait to read the next story tomorrow!
For math, we did a couple of Saxon K lessons. We're doing more than one per day because most of them are very easy for him and we're just working through this one as a basis for Saxon 1. We're hoping to start that after Christmas break. One day, we did a whole 2 weeks worth of lessons in one day because we were having so much fun!
That's it for Day 1, but it left us excited for Day 2!
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