MFW ECC & 1st Grade, Week 1

Well, our first week is now in the past!  Read more about our first day here.  So far, I'm VERY pleased with Exploring Countries & Cultures (ECC from now on).  We started off the week learning the bible verse, John 3:16, "For God so loved the world...".  Perfect beginning to our year of world geography.  I LOVE that My Father's World includes books (and sometimes creates their own) that have the Christian worldview.  I really like Window on the World and God Speaks Numanggong so far!  Above, is Caleb's John 3:19 poster with pictures of people from all over the world.  Below is Rebekah's.

Here is Caleb's copywork of the verse.  He is very disappointed that you have to write in school.  I'm not sure how to help him have a good attitude about it.  So far, I have been talking to him about how we can choose to have a good attitude or not.  Not sure if it's had any effect yet...

That brings us to geography.  We talked about how it's hard to make a flat map of a sphere shaped globe.  Below is our orange globe before and after we tried to flatten it.  I should have used a better marker to draw the continents on!

Our teacher's manual had a cute song to learn the continents, which they seemed to like.  Caleb did not like filling out the continents on this map.  Why?  Because it required writing!  Ugh...

We are also making a geography vocabulary box.  They will write the definition on one side and draw a picture of it on the other side.  I had Rebekah only write the word, she likes to write though!

Here they are making a map of the deck.

Lastly, we listened to "Hello to all the Children of the World" on this CD:

Our science goes with our geography as well.  We'll be learning about all the different habitats of the world as well as many animals that live in each country.  We started with our backyard!  Below, they are investigating the ecosystem of a square yard of lawn.  They were mostly excited about using magnifying glasses!

I was really excited to get my amazon order of these two field guides for our nature studies:

We went for a walk right away and picked wildflowers along the way.  They had fun trying to find the names of them in our book.  I love that it is organized by color, with the right page being a full page picture, and the left page having the information about each plant.  We'll be starting a tree project next week!

Daddy helped us dig for worms to put in a jar to observe for the next week too.  Here's the first picture, more to come next week.

I went ahead and got them both a copy of the Complete Book of Animals.  I think I could have gotten by with only one and just copied the few activity pages that Rebekah wanted to do.  But, they both do enjoy having their own book!

Caleb has not started spelling yet, instead we are doing some handwriting review.  He did start Language Arts though.  Below, he had to find three singular and three plural words in any book.  He didn't mind this writing, I think he was relieved he didn't have to write sentences!

Rebekah has been a sponge in her first week of 1st grade!  She's been so excited to learn to read!  She's been doing a lot of handwriting practice, and also reviewing her letter sounds.  We've talked about how the bible was originally written on scrolls, so she made a mini one.

We've been reading this devotional book during our "tea time", also known as snack time!  I'm impressed with it so far.  The lessons are short and involve animals/nature.  The kids have been able to understand the lessons pretty well.

Rebekah has a math basket that she uses every day to practice her "number of the day".  Below is her paper from number 3.  I have since decided she only need a half a sheet per number.  Her box includes a 100 chart, a ruler, a bean cup, a money cup, and unifix cubes.  To see more of her work, take a look at my post about our first day here.

And they all had a little home ec, how to peel a hard boiled egg!  We made egg salad sandwiches for lunch!