John is in 1st Grade this year. I am following the rule of an hour per grade, so he does roughly 1 hour of academic work a day. Maybe. Sometimes it is much less. Though, he is always learning.
As the fourth, he benefits from what I have learned over the years. Namely, don't stress the small things. I let his interests guide our lessons and fortunately have LOADS of resources after 8 years of collecting. One day, he asked about what happened to his food after chewing: Magic School Bus episode about the Digestive System, Book about where my food goes, and Puzzle about the internal organs!
Another day, we spent time making webs with words in them inspired by
Charlotte's Web. I have read this book to my children three times, but only John commented he wished he could speak to spiders. And he and I take special care when we see them...just in case a pig's life is on the line. But, we still love bacon. We are very conflicted.
The fact that John can read makes 1st Grade (and Kindergarten) way easier. After a pretty loosey goosey Kindergarten year, he has learned to be more disciplined. He knows which books he needs to complete every day. And he does it well. He knows that if his writing is not as good as we both know he can do, he will have to do it over. That is just the way it is. And he has perfected a lower case 'A'. It is beautiful and he will proudly mention it as I look over his handwriting.
Part of his regular work are logic puzzles of some sort. He can get overwhelmed with Sudokus, but he can also complete them in the right mood. And with the audience of a couple of eager brothers. I have been most impressed at how well he completes other logic puzzles that require deduction from reading clues. We haven't spent a lot of time on reading comprehension, but he seems to be doing just fine.
But, I felt we needed to add at least some reading comprehension each week. Today he read this excerpt to me and answered questions. What I loved is that we were able to discuss how his friends on the street are from Ethiopia, Korea (international adoptions), and Turkey (moved here last year). We also have neighbors that are first generation Americans from Vietnam (and love English Premier League Soccer!). One of his questions was what is something a person from another country can teach you. He immediately said: "Denadush"..he said his friend, Delaney, had taught him that is how you say 'hello' in Ethiopian. Now, he is 6 years old, so I needed to look up the spelling of this for my post. Initially, this did not come up with any hits. However, upon looking up Common Ethiopian phrases, Wikipedia gave me: 'Dehna adersh' which is an Amharic phrase for saying 'Good Morning' to a woman. Sounds about right.
Just to help this come full circle, I asked him if he had learned phrases from his friends born in Turkey. He gave me a little smile and said...and I will paraphrase here: Just words for common bodily functions. It is probably too much to hope for that converation occurred the same day we learned about the digestive system! But, if it didn't, I'm sure it was a good review :)!
