Calvert Week in Review

This was our first week of First Grade!  We mostly covered review material in math and language arts: object position; grouping, sorting, and classifying objects; short a words; identifying and writing lowercase and capital letters.

Miss M is far beyond all this, but a little easy review for getting into the routine of school is fine with me! It builds her confidence and so far has kept her interest despite it’s being too easy for her.

In science, we learned to observe, compare, and classify using our five senses.  We also discussed how scientists use the scientific method to learn about the world.  Miss M is fixated on the magnifying glass that came with the curriculum and wanted to use “magnifying glass!” as her answer to every question.  The book Your Five Senses by Melvin and Gilda Berger was a big hit with Miss M – not included with the Calvert curriculum.

Our social studies lessons didn’t quite happen because I realized during Lesson 2 that I was missing the social studies book! (But I got two Reading Work Pages…oops!)  So we discussed what social studies is and recited the Pledge of Allegiance, but didn’t do any of the associated activities or worksheets. Calvert is sending the missing book and we’ll catch up later.

One area Miss M definitely needs work in is writing.  She writes a lot in her free play time, but does not use lowercase letters and rarely writes right-to-left/top-to-bottom.  She starts somewhere and when she runs out of space continues the proper way to write lowercase letters using the primary lined dry erase boards I got at Target last year.  I’ve seen so much improvement in just this one week!  She concentrates on her letter formation and therefore writes quite slowly.  She sometimes drives me nuts ‘cause she wants to write her name on all her papers; her name is 9 letters long!!!
any ol’ where with no regard for legibility.  Obviously that’s normal for a kid her age, but it makes it very hard to understand what she’s written, which frustrates her.  I try not to correct her during her play time, but when we “do school” I hold her to a more traditional standard.  I don’t let her write on unlined paper for school and I have been showing her

I love the Houghton Mifflin readers! Wow, text books were not that colorful when I was a kid!  Each week features three readings from different genres.  This week’s were: fantasy, realistic fiction, and nonfiction.  Miss M did not like it that I kept interrupting her at the end of each page to ask questions about the reading, but after the first two lessons she got used to it and told me, “After you mess me up and we’re all done, I’m going to read it again and don’t mess me up, okay, mom?”