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I think we just had our first full week of school since July! Yay!

Since I decided a couple of weeks ago (with this post) to focus on math, language, and reading as our base and follow interests with everything else, I ordered a couple of books from Timberdoodle for Sunny. I got Language Lessons for the Very Young, a Charlotte Mason style book for grammar, writing, comprehension, etc. and Horizons math for 1st grade (student books only). The Horizons page has a link for a placement test.

The box came on Monday and Sunny wanted to crack into it immediately so we did the first lesson for math and the first lesson for language. Mon-Thurs, we did math, language, and spelling. I've been giving her 10 spelling words per day - I made spelling lists out of the phonics book I'm using with Posy. The lessons are so short that we're done in about 30 minutes, and that's if Sunny dawdles around. She reads and reads on her own - I don't track that. We're reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (the original, not an edited kids version) at bedtime, so we also have read-aloud time with some good literature.

We've actually done almost 10 lessons in the language book - one lesson was to look at a poem and count how many stanzas it had. That was it. So we kept going. Copywork is going to be laborious because Sunny still struggles with handwriting but we'll plug along through it.

I also got the Sticker Atlas of the USA and the Sticker Atlas of the World - we haven't done ALL the stickers in both books yet but not for a lack of enthusiasm. The stickers themselves, because the pages/stickers have everything movable, don't actually stay in place. So we're using double-sided tape to help and we used up everything I had. Anyway, in the World atlas, there are activities about animals and their habitats, major landmarks on each continent, and the country lists. Lots of things to learn about from other books and online - some of the animals, I'd never heard of. And you're supposed to put the landmark in the right location - I need to look up everything except Machu Pichu for South America (I do know that's in Peru because we have friends who have been there). We haven't gotten into the USA book yet.

I designated Friday as Game Day if work is done well and without (or with minimal) complaining the rest of the week. Sunny doesn't forget stuff like that. So yesterday, we played Connect Four (math!), read some library books, and spent a long time with the World atlas after I got more tape. Because the Atlas is "not" a geography lesson - it's a sticker book!