This is our last day of our first week. It is hard to believe we are already down to 35 more weeks! For Andrew, the First Grade has brought a lot of writing assignments and today was no exception. In fact, I am trying to sneak in short writing tasks here and there to get him more used to the activity. Andrew's penmanship is very good for his age and all we need now is focus and speed. And they will come in time, I believe.
In our geography lesson we continued to study countries. Today's subject was different languages. It is no news to my kids who hear me talk in Estonian every day and, in Estonia, they were surrounded by people who did not speak their language. We tried to say 'Hello, my name is ...' in many different languages, including Estonian. When we got to the Russian language, I wrote Andrew's and Saara's names on the board in the Cyrillic alphabet. The kids thought it was very wrong because Saara's name spelled: Caapa, and Andrew's: Aндpy or Aндpeй.
Saara already knows all her letters, both uppercase and lowercase. I am confident, she's ready to read. We have been working some with phonics and she knows a handful of sight words, but today we got really down to business as she 'inherited' Andrew's sight word flip cards.
Our main 'attraction' today was the beloved science video. Surprise-surprise! we had a different 'scientist' demonstrating the experiments this time. Saara was kind of missing the 'other' guy. The experiments themselves were fun. All of them were about magnets. Again, we did some writing by recording our own experiments in our science notebooks.
Our first week is over. As a teacher, I loved it. I can tell the kids enjoyed it too. They have already fallen in love with Charlotte and Uncle Wiggily, Saara wants to know what the Bernstein bears are doing next, Andrew can not get enough of the National Geographic website, and I could go on with all the great things we have been introduced to and continue to explore. Oh, come Week 2, we are ready!
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| Andrew and Saara are learning to say their names in Estonian. |
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| Saara learning her first six sight words. |
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| Magnet fun. Andrew and Saara finding out what sticks and what does not stick. |
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| Writing, writing, writing. Andrew recording his science experiments. |
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| So, cream of chicken sticks (steel) and Coke does not (aluminum). I told the kids they can watch Toy Story 3 just so they can see again the recycling center scene where metal trash was sorted by magnets. | |
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| Not a very clear picture, but I had to upload this one too. How often would you see a scorpion with baby scorpions on its back? Instead of screaming for the menfolk to come and deal with the poisonous beast, I called Andrew and Saara to come and take a closer look. |
