First Grade - Day One: SUCCESS!

 

Originally posted on August 17, 2009

 

Rachael officially started first grade on August 17! Even though I thought I had planned too much for our first day...it was an absolute success.

We started out with a breakfast of blueberry waffles. Absolutely essential to the learning process, you know. Then she decorated her "first day" sign and posed for a picture before getting down to business.

I'm organizing our daily lessons with "workboxes" - an idea stolen borrowed from a homeschooling mommy friend's blog. Someday, I'll actually read the book on how workboxes are supposed to work...but for now, a very simple version worked out quite well today.
 

Ignore the junk in the background. That room is a work in progress, after all. Anyway...each box has a permanent number (on the left) and a removable number, stuck on with velcro. Inside each drawer is one subject that we'll cover that day - everything that we need for that lesson is inside the drawer, down to pencils, crayons, etc.
 

As we finish the lesson in a drawer, she removes the velcro number and sticks it to these handy little holders. There are actually ten spots, so she gets two "extra" activities thrown into the mix. Computer time is shown here - she also has the option to watch one show on TV. I need to come up with more ideas. Want to see what was inside the drawers today?
 

Drawer #1 will always be her devotional Bible, along with the day's memory verse and words to whatever song she's learning that week. (Yes, she already knows "Jesus Loves Me", but this week she's learning the second verse. I'm also hoping Milly will pick it up from hearing her sister sing - goodness knows she's picked up every song that Dora sings quite well, so I'm sure she's capable.)

Drawer #2 held our math book today - only the teacher's manual, as we only did review of place values and addition. She did a full worksheet of addition problems and had no trouble with the adding - only remembering which direction to write her 2s, 5s and 9s. She thinks it's absolutely hilarious to write her 9 backward - making it look like a P - and then informing me that "OOPS, she just P'ed in her book again!" We'll be doing more adding tomorrow, only in columns instead of horizontally. And of course, more working on that pesky skip counting by fives.

Drawer #3 was Language Arts. LLATL is awesome in that it's broken down into daily lessons already - no planning needed. Today's lesson consisted of reading a poem, talking about it, underlining the nouns in the poem, deciding which sentence went with a picture, reading several short words, writing a sentence, etc. It didn't take long at all, and I'm really looking forward to doing more tomorrow!

Drawer #4 is a great example of what workboxes can be for bigger kids - a completely "do it yourself" drawer! Love this little lined white board we found in the $1 bin at Target. Stuck to it are a list of her eight spelling words for this week, with instructions to write them on the board. I'm loving the things she can do by herself and have me look at later!

Drawer #5 contains another stolen borrowed idea - the Nature Journal. The first item of business was decorating the cover. Then, she took her binder and colored pencils outside with instructions to "find something in nature and draw it." She chose to draw her pet box turtles, Ruby and Felicity. Wonder what she'll choose tomorrow?
 

Hmm, this drawer looks suspiciously like the last one. This binder, however, is for her unit study on The Book of Virtues. Once again, she decorated the cover first, and reviewed the vocabulary words (philosophy, development, disciple, passion, appetite and reason) that we started on last week.

Believe it or not, I was trying to start slow today...so drawer #7 was kind of filler. I finally printed out the information for her Girl Scout Shape Up! patch and started documenting her physical activity time. We got off to a good start by having a big ol' dance party in the living room for half an hour this afternoon. Gotta love the 90s music channel!
 

Finally, drawer #8 - which will always be the last drawer of the day and will always contain this little black and white journal. This is Rachael's "end of the day" journal. I'll start a few questions in it for her each day, and it will be up to her to finish them. Unlike in her workbooks, I won't be offering spelling help in her journal - I want her to write her answers the way she thinks they should be. Mostly, I just want to have these years from now to go back and see how cute her answers were. :)  Today's entry was as follows (my words beginning, the bolded words at the end are hers, spelling errors included):

"My first day of first grade was FUN.My favorite part of the day was drawing in my journal.
Tomorrow, I hope we do ART.
I am proud of myself for doeng it."

Okay, okay, I did help her with the word journal. She asked and said she really wanted it to be right. Besides, it was written right on the cover if she had thought to look. ;)

Once school was over for the day, us girls headed off to let my mom thoroughly spoil the grandbabies. Rachael got her choice of restaurants for dinner (pizza buffet at Cici's) and Gramma picked up all of the still needed school supplies from Target - down to a pink baseball and pink tennis balls to use as part of upcoming science projects. She also got a new movie (Barbie and the Diamond Castle) and book (Fancy Nancy - The Show Must Go On) from Gramma, who tends to go a little overboard but mostly justified it this time. In the interest of fairness, Milly also came home with a new book (DORA) and coloring pad (DORA) to help keep her busy during school time. :)

All in all, we had a great first day. We got so much work done in so little time, and Rachael absolutely loved the freedom of deciding which box/drawer would be opened next. The only big kink I still need to work out is finding more things for Milly to do during school time - sure, I could print out DORA coloring pages all day long, but come on. Even that will get old eventually. I assume. I recently exhumed Rachael's old PowerTouch Baby (the Fisher-Price version of the LeapPad) with all its books and cartridges from a tub of outgrown baby toys, and have it ready to go for tomorrow - maybe that will keep her entertained for a while. If anyone has ideas on how to keep a 1-1/2-year-old happy during school time, please share your insight with me