Back to school!

I love the smell, look, and feel of new notebooks, crayons, and pencils. Brand new school books with no creases just look especially pretty to me. I am so excited that we are back to school! Initially the kids did not share my enthusiasm. I tried hyping it up for about a week prior to beginning, but that didn't spark much interest. On Monday, August 5, 2013 Jayden officially began second grade and Caitlin began kindergarten.

The entire week we focused on math & language arts (spelling, writing, grammar), as well as our routine 30 minutes of silent reading for Jayden and 1 book of reading for Caitlin. I wanted to ease them back into school instead of thrusting them back in full force.

Jayden's Language Arts curriculum is definitely an improvement over last year's curriculum. Last year we used a free LA curriculum which wasn't terrible, but definitely did not seem as detailed as this curriculum. I really love that this curriculum has very little prep time and we can just open it up and go with it. The assignment is clear and there are no frills with it that can be a distraction. I also love that Jayden can do this with very little guidance from me if I need to help Caitlin with her work.

 

For writing, Jayden learned about "subjects" and "predicates" and the role they play in a sentence.

For grammar he worked on proper sentences, including capitalization and punctuation marks.

This is his spelling list 

I love that the definitions for his spelling words are on first page of each new week. Initially he was worried that he would have to look up the definitions. When I looked over the teacher's manual, one of the first things it says is that the definitions are there to introduce the words to the students, not for them to fret over. For some reason, this made me feel really calm and it made Jayden very happy! He likes looking in the dictionary but he doesn't want to have to do it.

Math is still a review for Jayden in the early chapters of Math in Focus. He is finishing up his addition section.

This lady came dressed for success. Wearing her compass ring and her Victorious necklace, she was ready for her first day of school. She is still not officially a kindergartner, but she will be doing kindergarten work for about 30 minutes a day. 

We found this workbook in Target in the dollar bins! It says grade one but it is definitely much easier than first grade work.

 She worked on counting items up to 10, and practiced writing her numbers 1-10. 

She is up to the green books (the last color of books in set 1) in her Bobs books!! She complains about reading but when it comes down to it, she laughs and enjoys herself with these books. Once she completes the next set, we will buy her the next level of books. Caitlin is working on blending sounds such as ch-, sh-, th-, etc.

I wanted to reminisce with you about how small my children looked last year, when they started pre-k & 1st grade. I went back and searched for our first day of school last year. I finally found it and saw... no pictures! I completely forgot that I somehow messed things up last year and the images were deleted from my blog. Oh well!

Here are my babies when they started school last year.This is the boy who went from reading at a second/third grade level, to reading Percy Jackson books. Seriously, he is reading "The Lightening Thief" right now for his quiet reading time!

 And this is the girl who went from recognizing her alphabet to reading!

These kids never cease to amaze me!