five families

We did a Word Family wrap-up exercise at the end of last week. I gave each of the boys their own story involving the five word families we worked with this block (eep, ail, ight, oat, and ule) to read to each other and draw pictures from. J's story was called "Moonlight Adventures", in which a sheep, a snail, a goat, and a mule explore the moonlight in a pool. (Here in J's photos you can see the snail looking at the reflection while the other animals are looking up at the moon itself, the way the adventure begins.)


Zoo Boy's story was called "Word Family Picnic" and described what happened when all five families decided to go on a picnic together. He depicted every member of each family in the story, along with their animals, and wrote their names across them. It was a pretty big project and took him quite some time, after which he told me that he was just too tired to write a title. J decided to write a title for him so that he would remember which story this drawing was about. (I took the photo before that happened.)

I'm going to extend this LA block one more week (for a total of 5 weeks) before moving on to a brief 2-week holiday block with the boys. Then we'll pick up with our final 1st Grade math block some time after our holiday break. That break could be anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks long, depending on how much reading of the 2nd grade materials I get done, since we'll be starting to work with those around Zoo Boy's 7th birthday in early March. Mostly I'll be looking at how to adapt it to meet Zoo Boy's needs as a late-1st grader/early 2nd-grader, while properly mirroring J, whose development has leaped forward quite a bit this semester and more closely approximates that of a 3rd grader at this point. (In fact, he's been telling people he's in 3rd grade when asked, which I find just fascinating since we never discuss grade level....)

Anyway, there are certainly some thoughtful posts in there somewhere if I can ever find a chance to sit down and actually put my ideas in writing....