First Grade Checking In

 We are trucking right along with first grade.  Now that I have 4 kids, I often forget to take pictures of everyday stuff.

 Much of our school day now takes place in the living room while I'm nursing the baby.

 I never used math manipulatives before this year and it's amazing to me how quickly David grasps new concepts by using the blocks.  Elizabeth has even picked up some stuff by listening & watching us use the blocks!

 I don't know why it never occurred to me to let David type stuff on the computer until he asked one day.  He occupied himself a good while.  And when he asked how to spell things, I told him to sound it out.  English can be tricky, though, but I thought he did a good job spelling things the way they sound using what he has learned so far.

 He loves learning Spanish words, also, and has now declared himself bilingual.  We are going to step it up and get some better Spanish training very soon... for both of us.  I haven't been very good at teaching him that because I never had it myself!

Adventures in First Grade Projects

We recently did an activity for science that demonstrated what happens to lava when it cools.  We used melted butter as the lava, so when it cooled it turned hard.  David wanted his lava to be colored & we don't have any red food coloring, so we made green lava... again.

I think I just need to get rid of all food coloring.  The plate of lava was sitting on the dining table when Rebekah found it.  Apparently the first thing she did after eating some of the green butter and getting it all over herself was to try to feed some of the green butter to Fluff... through the screen door.  Then there was a trail of green fingerprints on the white cabinets into the kitchen.  Of course, it was easier to find all the splotches of butter since they were green.

Today we did a pumpkin project.  Before cutting into the pumpkin, David estimated that there would be 12 seeds inside.

After a peek inside, he changed his answer to 100.

We sorted the seeds into 10's.  Then grouped the 10's into 100's just like we've been doing with the manipulatives in Math-U-See!

 Then David tallied up how many hundreds, tens and units we had...

Wow!  That was a lot of seeds!

After that, he designed a face for his pumpkin and I carved it for him.  I love this picture!