Little Hearts For His Glory Week 2

We are on our second week of Heart of Dakota's Little Hearts For His Glory and are having a blast!  Lucy has already done My Father's World K and we were part way through first grade when we decided to switch.  It was a bit hard to do, wondering if this was really going to be better for us or not.  I realize that each program will have it's ups and downs, but MFW 1st was just not working for Lucy on so many levels.  I like what I am seeing in her these past two weeks and am encouraged that this was a change for the better.

We are enjoying the activities.  They are easy to do and so much fun.  Each day has us jumping around, creating, acting things out, and more.  Julia feels like she is more a part of our schoolwork now and even knows the correct answers to review questions quite often!  Esther (13 months) likes to join our "rhyme in motion".  Today she was shaking her finger, saying "no, no" and walking backwards just like the big girls.  It was sooo cute!

The girls are really thinking about the Bible lessons and concepts, they often come up with questions at the dinner table related to our studies that day.  I feel like things are sinking in a bit more as far as Bible application.  They also have learned both memory verses so far and love the music CD.

Other random thoughts:

I'm not sure yet how meaty the science is.  We are just getting started, but I may have to think of ways to add a bit more there.  Maybe just watching related videos on the computer with Dad at night would be enough.  The science textbook jumps around a bit, but is nice to have.  The girls have enjoyed looking at the pictures.  Yesterday's activity was a big hit, the girls spent over an hour experimenting with boats in the bathtub.

Math is really basic, but we're just going with it.  I feel like Lucy needed some easy work to boost her confidence and I'm sure it will get harder as we go.  Julia is loving the hands-on math and joins us every day.  Lucy still does a page or two from the MFW 1st grade book some days.  I do not like how Singapore math writes their 4s and 5s, especialy the 4 I think is silly.  Not a big deal though.

For phonics we are still using the MFW 1st grade workbook, Bible reader, and notebook.  As we near the end of the workbook, I think we'll start the Emerging Readers set from Heart of Dakota.  I also picked up an Explode the Code workbook that Lucy really enjoys.  We'll keep going with those for the phonics review.  I have The Reading Lesson coming in the mail for me to review.  I am going to see how Julia does with it, and maybe place Lucy towards the end of the book.  I'm just not sure how well she is retaining the information from the MFW phonics workbook and want to be sure we have a good foundation there before moving on.  I like that the phonics is not tied with the rest of the work, so we are free to move at our own pace.

I already mentioned that the teacher's book is very open and go.  I am loving this.  I really enjoy having the boxes for the day laid out in front of me.  Really.  The flipping back and forth in the MFW teacher's manuals had me feeling like I was forgetting something most days.  So far we have easily done everything that LHFHG has laid out for us.  I do like that there is still a short library list in the back of the teacher's manual, the girls enjoy having library books related to the topics.

Ok, this is enough of a novel for now.  I know that some of you were interested to hear how things went for us and wanted to share my thoughts since having the books in hand.  Feel free to ask if you have any questions and I'm sure I'll share more as we go along.  We are really enjoying Little Hearts For His Glory, I feel like we have joy back in our school days!