that's a wrap!

We finished up our week working with the "Vowel Friends" story, which introduces that famous rule "when two (vowel) friends go walking, the first does the talking." Of course, the Enki version of the story is very rich in imagery and language.


This time I'm leading with my drawing -- after recalling the story the day after reading it, we drew the fire scene with the vowel headings. The next day (today) we wrote in the vowel friends and underlined them each, then filled in to make words around them.



J's work. The kids insisted on coming up with their own words for most of the vowel pairs (we had to call Mimi for an assist with "ei" though -- right off the top of her head she came up with "weird"! Since we'd struggled so long without coming up with anything, we all wrote that one down).








And here's Zoo Boy's work. He was really into this, and as a result did quite a bit of writing without tiring.

And that's pretty much a wrap on 1st Grade! There's still one more Math story, along with a handful of related games, that I plan on using in a mini-block February-ish, and I'll probably throw together a really "lite" January block (because my kids will be ready to start again long before I will be after our holiday break) involving some of the fragments of 1st that we skipped over in addition to more focused handwriting to try to help Zoo Boy with his difficulties there. But I'm officially calling 1st Grade over. It's on to the 2nd Grade format and materials (which, never fear, I'll post PLENTY about) when we start up full-swing again, late February or early March.


Meanwhile, we're kicking off our 2-week Holiday Block with some pretty exciting stuff. I'll give you a hint:




I'll give you a bigger hint (see if you can pick J out in the 3rd row. There are 4 rows, look in from the left side....):







More details -- and photos! (and if you're lucky, a video clip) -- at the end of the weekend!