Our First Grade Lessons

Here is a recap of our First Grade using The Well-Trained Mind among other resources.

Bible (in order of how we used them)
Leading Little Ones to God by Marian Schooland
Big Thoughts for Little People by Kenneth Taylor
Right Choices by Kenneth Taylor
Explorer's Bible Study Beginnings I: Old Testament

also learned/memorized
The Lord's Prayer
The Apostles' Creed
Our House Rules (scripturally based)
Hymns from Explorer's Bible Study that are on the cd "My First Hymnal"

Handwriting
D'Nealian Handwriting Practice by MCP until we switched to copywork with scripture, then switched to poetry. Started Classically Cursive by Veritas Press (also D'Nealian)

Poetry Memorization
First Language Lessons and Poem Copybook of "A Child's Garden of Verses" by R.L. Stevenson. We also read poems that pertain to anything we're studying, any subject or just to have a good laugh.

Math
Horizons 1 box set, I like the Teacher's Manual, also bought RightStart Math Games but haven't used it but 3x. We will probably use it more as the concepts get more complicated in our math studies.

Science
Life science studies based on WTM rev. ed.'s suggestions. See the right hand sidebar for the Life Science download. We've raised a frog but won't do butterflies this year, we did catch caterpillars but they died b/c we couldn't find their food source.

History
SOTW Vol 1. with Activity Guide reading Egermeier's Bible Storybook alongside with schedule from www.paulasarchives.com. We've added the VP History cards/CDs for memorization purposes and we love them!

Will also read Peace & Peril by Mindy & Brandon Winthrow at the end of SOTW 1 to start church history. We've done about 10 projects throughout the year for history.

Reading
Ordinary Parents' Guide to Teaching Reading with Dick and Jane, Bob Books, Nora Gaydos readers (Now I'm Reading) series. We tried the McGuffey Readers but we just didn't stick with it.
Books we've read:
Click here to see the list
It needs to be updated but I took pretty good record. I also started dd on a reading log, she's to read 10 books on her level or just about and write in a log:
Date:
Title:
Author:
Favorite character:

this will increase as her reading skills do.


Grammar
First Language Lessons with the audio cd and Ruth Heller's books about grammar as well as poems I've found about grammar.

Spelling
Spelling Workout A (finished in 4 months)
Spelling Workout B (finished in 4 months)
We're done a little dictation throughout the year, really just about spelling words. We've increased from being able to say 1 letter at a time to saying 4 or 5 letters.

Language
We've decided to learn French, in fact- becoming a bilingual family. DD6, DS3 and myself are working towards being able to speak French all day and read/write in French. We're using a bunch of different resources, The Easy French is the curriculum I chose. We're putting off Latin until 3rd or 4th grade.

Art
We decided to focus on Art this year so we used Artistic Pursuits, K-3 Book 1. This went very well, dd's favorite subject! I'm combining Artistic Pursuits into history next year so we can study music as a separate subject. We also used Harmony Fine Arts (www.harmonyfinearts.com) which combines art and music á la Charlotte Mason in chronological order.

Other activities:
-DD started piano lessons (1x a week)
-We tried Recorder but she couldn't finger the holes correctly (used Recorder Fun!)