The First Week of First Grade!

Well, we started back to school on Monday and what a week it has been! Everything has gone really well.

Everyday we study God's Word, do phonics, math and spelling. On M,W,F we also do History for Little Pilgrims and on T,Th we do lessons from the farmyard and science. Math and phonics has been review so things are going very easily in those subjects.

We didn't use a spelling curriculum last year and I didn't know what a struggle that would be. Spelling, by far, took the most time and was the most frustrating of our lessons. They had 20 words this week, all of which they could read easily, but being able to read them and knowing how to spell them are very different! I almost scraped the book for now, but decided to persevere through this first week at least and then if it still wasn't going well, pick it up again later in the year.

But, by the end of the week, they had improved greatly. Today they had their test. Katie drew a blank on the word "had" for whatever reason and this test took about 30 minutes to administer, but they kept sounding out the words over and over until they put something down. I was VERY surprised at how well they did considering their struggles this week.