First Day of 4th Grade

So, you all saw all of the first day of school pictures on your Facebook streams and all of the back-to-school sales and posts a few weeks ago, but here I am with our first day of school blog. See, our first day was spent on the road touring with my musician hubby. So, even though we logged tons of history hours and PE while we were gone, we did not officially start back with the books until yesterday.

We continued where we left off with our Creation Science book that I love!

I wanted to write a little bit about how my 4th grader's first day went, what curriculum we are using this year, and share a few pics.



First of all, this is how she looked on her technical 1st day of 4th grade with her sis sorta photobombing:

And, about a week later playing tennis for the first time.

One of her favorite things about 4th grade is that she can till use colors, glue, and scissors and the curriculum is still colorful and fun.

We began with a quick review of a few worksheets from HelpTeaching.com and then moved into Bible which is a study on John from Grapevine Ministries. These studies allow her to draw and color using simple stick figure images that illustrate the Bible passages we read about.

When we finished with the Bible study, I had her play a game that I am reviewing from Blue Orange called Top That! It is a game where you hide objects and stack them based upon cards that contain pictures. Not sure if it is logable, but it was a nice little active break in between diving in deeper into school work.

I then had her read some history from a Carol P. Roman book, If you were me and lived in China.

We moved into Spelling You See, picking up where we had left off with the G level. Another curriculum source we both absolutely love because it mixes historical accounts with grammar and reading.

We continued on where we left off for a review on Grammar and Phonics from Jolly Phonics and Jolly Grammar. Though, it is a bit below her grade level, it is serving as great review for now until we move more into another writing curriculum later in the year.

By this time, we had eaten a bit of a snack and she was sitting at the kitchen counter, away from her sister who was needing to watch a DVD on Logic. So, we quietly proceeded with Grammar and began Considering God's Creation with a study on plants (where we had left off in the spring).

After Science, we tackled math. This child is not a lover of math at all. We tried Learn Bop online and soon discovered that she requires a whole lot more hands-on, demonstrations of working through problems. Not sure it's going to do the trick all year, but for now I am using it as a starting point until I can figure out what else to do for her.

One thing about this particular child is that she really responds well to hands-on craft and art style projects. So, we have begun to "beautify math" by taking every problem we encounter and drawing the word problem. It was quite colorful and quite a workout for me as the instructor, but whatever it takes is what works.

We are hoping to dig deeper into Latin, Spanish, and maybe a bit of French throughout the year as well as learning more about the states and the presidents and definitely focusing more on writing composition.

One subject we did not cover today was art, and we really need to as she absolutely loves art!