Sonlight Core A {Back to School!}

We had a great first week! We finished Week 1 in 3 days, and rather than moving on to Week 2, I added in some extra summer learning fun to go along - while I can! (I've not yet started school with the older boys.) 

For Bible, we covered Creation to Abraham this week, added Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark, and Abraham to our Book of Time, and memorized Romans 3:23.

For History and World Cultures, we read about the first peoples (ancient civilizations) and how and where they lived using the books The Children's Encyclopedia and Living Long Ago (with modification).  We read about cave paintings and instead of making one as suggested, we visited the Pictograph Caves in Montana to see real ones!







This sign had the kids on edge - every little movement made them jump!

We saw birds, lots of rabbits and even a toad. When I was a kid, we often found
lizards scurrying under the rocks, but we didn't see any this time. 

It was a hot day! 



Read-Alouds: The Boxcar Children, The Llama Who Had No Pajama (poetry), The Arnold Lobel Book of Mother Goose and The Story About Ping. For Ping, we listened to the book on CD that I bought for our row.

But, our focus was on The Boxcar Children and we are enjoying it!  We did the discussion questions from the IG and some activities from Lesson Pathways and a few just inspired from the book. And I bought The Boxcar Children Cookbook to use with the book.

This week, we had blueberries and cream and homemade brown bread, Luke called Sears to have them hold a refrigerator box for us so we can paint it for a boxcar, we learned about nutrition and the new food pyramid, and made a healthy lunch.

Trip to Safeway to shop for one item from each food group for our healthy lunch. 

{I will share more of our learning time with The Boxcar Children when we are done!}

Additional activities for SL this week includes Create a Calendar and Practical Life Skills checklist (added this to my weekly binder). Mali and Elli are taking swimming lessons at the Y this summer (they just completed 1 session and start up again in July).


Swimming is a Practical Life Skill for approximately 1st to 2nd grade. 

In Science, we are learning about the earth, day and night, seasons, and tadpoles and frogs.

Tadpoles and Frogs is a 5-Day selection and is meant just for us to enjoy reading (no activities or discussion questions), so I focused on that book for our extra learning. . . which inspired me to pull out Five in a Row Volume 3 and row The Salamander Room! It's funny because I had no desire whatsoever to row a book again this soon (I mean zero, as in I got a sick feeling in my stomach just thinking about it!) and I was suddenly inspired to row! I guess my focus is to be on Sonlight this year, and add in FI♥AR as it fits. And since we are studying amphibians, The Salamander Room fits! Also, in weeks 19-21, Sonlight adds in the book Caterpillars and Butterflies, again, just for us to enjoy, so we will read it with our row of The Salamander Room and study butterflies.

Trip to the pond to look for frogs. 

In Language Arts, Malachi worked in Sonlight LA 1 Weeks 25 - 30. He read The Best Trick and Green Eggs and Ham, Little Bear, Put Me in the Zoo, and did the language activities that go with the weeks these books are scheduled, but not all of the copywork. We do that about twice a week, try to do all the language activities (antonyms, synonyms, homophones, articles, contractions, etc.), review spelling, and do at least one of the Creative Expression writing assignments a week.  So far, it has been a nice review and a good chance to help Malachi improve his fluency. I am feeling very confident (the closer we get to the end of LA1!) that he is ready for LA2. In fact, I would start him on it now, but he only has 6 weeks of LA1 to finish and he will finish that up soon enough.


Eliana started All About Reading Level 1 and is doing fantastic! We are reviewing Adventures in Reading with Zig Zag Zebra along with our learning and I will be sharing my review soon. She is currently on Lesson 7 (at the time of writing this on Tuesday) and has read 4 stories from the first book. We are not doing all of the fluency practice sheets, but are doing the word cards, word flippers, and activities from the student book. I think this is a good fit for her right now. (Those fluency practice sheets were hard for Malachi and he was a year older when he did this level!). When she is finished with this level, I will start her on Sonlight LA1 and All About Spelling 1. (I did AAR1 and AAS1 concurrently with Malachi, but Marie recommends that you do AAR1 first. I didn't know this at the time and it worked well for Malachi - because he was ready and we were already half way through AAS. Eliana may be ready, but I will wait and use it instead of Sonlight spelling (which aligns with ETC and she will have plenty of practice with the ETC books).

We are using You Can Read for extra practice the sight words in AAR1. 

Phonogram Bingo for review. 

Adventures in Reading with Zig Zag Zebra ~ learning about vowels and consonants.
{She is feeding Ziggy the vowel apples!}

More sight word practice. 


She's reading! 


Progress! We made it through lesson 9 this week (our 2nd week with the program). 

In Math, Malachi started Singapore 2A and Eliana started Earlybird Book B. I also signed her up for a subscription to Mathletics.  It gave Malachi such a strong background in math and I am hoping that it will reinforce what she is learning in Earlybird Math and give her some time to mature in her handwriting skills. (We will start handwriting as soon as I find the books!).

Working in his 2A workbook. We go over the textbook together, and then he does the workbook independently. 


We are using stickers (an idea I got on the Sonlight forum) or I do the writing for her. 

We are also using Learning Wrap-Ups for math practice. So far, we have only used them on road trips.



And that's a wrap! :) 

I hope you enjoyed a glimpse into our first week with Sonlight Core A! 

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