First Week of School

I posted a bit in this post about our first day of school and things that we did. Overall our week was a lot of fun and the girls both enjoyed it. Some of the highlights were...

Our creation books. I put page protectors in a folder to make books and Lucy and Julia both carried these around all week "reading" their creation story. They were very excited to add a new page each day. We followed the instructions in the teacher's manual for these except day 3 we used our handprint for the tree and fingerprints for the fruit on the tree. Day 5 we used watercolor paint to make an ocean scene. (For day 6 I plan to have Lucy draw a person and then use stickers for the animals.) When we are done with displaying our creation numbers I'm going to put these in the books as well, on the back of the corresponding day.

Dirt cake. On Wednesday (day 3), we celebrated the fact that God made dirt. Lucy and Julia helped me make dirt cake by smashing up Oreo cookies, mixing pudding, and putting it all together. Later on I thought, "God made the earth, trees, plants... bananas grow on trees... why didn't I just have them make banana bread? lol" The dessert was very sugary and not something my kids are used to having, but of course it ended up being a big hit!

I had to make the alphabet review harder for Lucy since the ideas in the teachers manual were too easy. Throughout the week she: sorted the ABC cards into upper and lower case piles, matched upper and lower case cards together, put the cards in abc order, told me the sounds the letters make, played memory matching sets of upper and lower case together, and named all of the lower case cards. I had her do a few alphabet puzzles we had, and a preschool game sorting "b" and "d".

I typed up a weekly summary page including the following information -

week of: (date)

theme: Creation

what we did: (summary similar to what I typed above)

books we read:

Lucy's favorite part: I told her I was typing about what we did this week and reminded her of things we did. I then had her tell me what her favorite part was and typed out the quote as she told me. Here is what she said: "All of it, but what I really, really, really like is doing the numbers because I'm really excited to know what it has. I'm excited to know what the 7 and the 6 has on it. That's all. But the dirt cake you gave me, I really, really liked it."

what Lucy learned: This one didn't work so well, she said "everything" and didn't really tell me anything new she learned. I'll try again next week and see if she learns anything. ;)

I think that we will enjoy having these summary pages to look back on and remember things that we did during the year. I also plan to print off and include a few photos we took during the week. These will go in a big binder in page protectors along with the summary page, artwork, and papers done during the week.

Another thing I did is organize all of our children's books. I'm not sure how long they'll stay this way, but I put green stickers on all of the MFW K books so that they will be easier to find.

Did anyone else start homeschooling this week? I'm planning to share weekly highlights of the things that we do, so check back next week and maybe you'll find some ideas you'd like to use. If you're blogging about preschool or My Father's World K especially, please leave a comment with the link.