The End of Our First Week of 4th Grade

Last year we struggled through the 6 units of Scott Foresman Grammar & Writing Grade 3. This year, I found Mc-Graw Hill Treasures Workbooks which have less copywork, and my son is able to do more independently because the instructions are clearer. But I didn't want to drop Foresman because I love the end-of-unit writing assignments. So, I decided to print out the McGraw-Hill for him to do on his own, and do the Foresman units together on the computer.

We gave it a try today and it went great. We did all the exercises verbally, and only the more creative exercises on paper. We learned about writing a Personal Narrative and actually had a fun grammar class. We flew through two chapters, as there is lots of repetition of stuff that my son finds easy. Having to copy several sentences just to prove that you know a fragment from a complete sentence is tedious. Reading out the answer is much more enjoyable. He'll still do plenty of copywork, but I prefer he do it with more interesting texts.

Here's what he wrote today -

He also worked on Science in Spanish. We're using this great little Larousse book on how things work. For each segment he reads, he fills in a Q&A table to remember whatever he considers important information. Today he learned about space travel, rockets, and space trash.

Today our Community Art Project starts back up, which means that 30+ kids will be running around here all afternoon. He's been counting the days and missing his friends. He spends 2.5 hours, twice a week in this program, and this year he'll also be spending one full morning a week with a group of slightly older kids in our Youth Leaders program. He'll be amongst the oldest in the kiddie group, and the youngest in the morning group. We'll see how it goes.

His favorite classes in the program are dance and team-building games.
They also do lots of arts&crafts, singing, theater and circus arts.

So, our first week of 4th grade has gone very well. I've posted every day this week, but today I start work and won't have time to post quite so often (we're going to be filming a documentary on the project, which is very exciting).