The boys finished MFW 1st grade. They are reading pretty well. Tigger has really taken off. He loves Calvin and Hobbes right now. Pooh is a little slower. We've found a couple of good motivators for him: a Lego comic story book (I found it at Sam's Club) and fortune cookies. He's actually starting to read signs on the road, too. We're still working through the Abeka 1st grader readers, and will continue to do so this summer and into next year. I basically just have them read 10 minutes a day to me. Tigger gets through 10-12 pages each time, but Pooh only gets through about 6 (he just reads a bit slower). So, Tigger is now a book-and-a-half ahead of Pooh.
We enjoyed doing the MFW 1st grade science. We just moved it all to our "light" day. The only thing I wish I had done for the science was go to Home Depot or Lowes and get some clear, flexible tubing to do some of the water experiments - there were several that needed it and we never did them. The boys also joined in on Exploring Creation through Astronomy that big sister was doing in RTR. We even made notebook pages. I did duty as scribe for them, but they drew and colored pictures.
The boys weren't always big on drawing pictures in their Bible notebooks. We always did double dictation for those, too, so as not to reinforce bad spelling. They really liked their Bible readers. One thing I started doing was going through the story before they read it and picking out any words they might have trouble with. I would write them on the whiteboard and we would work on sounding them out before reading them in the Bible reader.
At the end of the year, we already had our 172 days in but I still had 2 weeks of curriculum left in RTR. So, we condensed the History and Science portions and fit them into one week. So we dropped all other subjects and just finished those off. I don't think I required any notebook pages for History, but I think we did a couple of science things. The "Is Pluto a Planet" debate was hard for Rabbit. She really tried, but after she tried to convince herself that it is still a planet she was more convinced it wasn't!
NASA has lots of pages on the planets that went perfectly with studying Astronomy. And their Sun page is awesome! I still go and look at that about once a week. The spacecraft MESSENGER got to Mercury either just before or just after we studied Mercury, so that was a great coincidence (or Providence, as the case probably is). It seems like there were some interesting events on Saturn, too, when we studied Saturn. So, I highly recommend keeping up with NASA's site.
A couple of weeks later Rabbit finished Singapore 4B! Hooray, she is caught up and on track to finish 5A/5B by the end of next year. Perfect! We didn't quite finish Writing Strands 4. We only have to do half of 5 next year, so I think we'll just continue where we left off in 4. She did finish her Latin Roots and English for the year. She's about halfway through Level 5 of All About Spelling. There were lots of weeks where we only got in 3 days of spelling.
In the second half of the year we added Piano lessons. That added quite a bit of work to my day, as I need to at least sit with the boys as they do their lessons. I usually only need to sit with Rabbit once, but the boys need a lot more assistance. I really like our piano teacher. She really tries to tailor the lessons to their interests. For example, Pooh is pretty good at memorizing the lessons, so she has him memorize them and then has him add rhythm to it. For Tigger, he is really into contemporary Christian music, so she has him work a little in the book, but also lets him pick a song to work on chords. And Rabbit is just flying through the music books.
The year went amazingly well doing the two programs. I'm pleased with how it turned out. I need to be more disciplined on somethings (like staying off the computer (meaning the Internet) until we're done with our day), but I think we did well. We've had to work on attitudes some days.
We just recently added a dog to the family, so we'll see how that affects our school days next year.
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