MFW1- Week 1

First week of school!  We had a great week!  Adler says he wants to be a chef when he grows up because "I always wanted to slice a carrot" and hazel wants to be a spy.

This first week, we concentrated on just getting our homeschool groove.  The program calls for a few light weeks before we get down to the nitty gritty of first grade:).

I introduced the kids to the calendar notebooks we will be doing every morning first thing.  In it, they practice handwriting as they write the days of the week and month, math skills as they graph the weather and figure the days of school, and learn about time and money through various sheets.

This week, we learned about things on the ground.  We especially concentrated on ants and worms! 

We read lots of books on things on the ground and watched several shows on them.  Adler especially liked wild kratts "squirmy wormy" episode.  We prepared and ate a delicious worm pudding (pudding and cookies and gummy worms).  We also went outside and observed ants.  We put some bread soaked in honey next to an ant hill and watched as the ants discovered the bread.  It took them awhile (around 15 minutes!) but once they found it, they were all over the bread.  For a minute, we thought we killed them because they were all so still on the bread.  I guess they were just busy eating it.  We later learned the Forager ants get the food and fill their bellies up and then regurgitate in in the ant nest for the other ants to eat- gross!  We talked about how we are to work hard like ants and how God gives us each special jobs like He gives the ants.  We must all work together.  We then drew in our nature journals about what we saw as we explored outside.  

(I don't remember seeing anyone being eaten by ants though!)

Hazel was learning her own stuff in addition to tagging along with Adler in his learning.  She was learning the letter F.  In keeping with the close to the ground theme, the kids created flowers out of scraps of paper that I just really love. 

All in all it was a great first week.  I hope to keep this up on the blog. I thought it would be such a nice record to have one day:).