Time Flies

So much for my plan to post more often here at A Time to Talk!

First grade has been humming along quite nicely. We still have bumps in the road - all receptive language related - but overall, I am very pleased with Hannah's progress this school year. Her language has grown considerably, with the greatest increases in phonological areas and in comprehension.

Here are a few successes from this school year:

• Comprehension. Working diligently on reading comprehension has helped immeasurably in her oral comprehension as well. Her ability to think about what she just read or about what she just heard before responding has improved so much. One of her favorite things this year is to find "the directions", read them and then do what is asked for without guidance from me. This may not seem like a huge deal for some, but it is for us.
• Penmanship. First of all her letters and numbers for the most part are now all facing the appropriate directions. She has also improved greatly in keeping her letters more uniform in size and sitting on the line.
  
• Grammar. I was apprehensive about introducing grammar, when language in general is a challenge for Hannah. I started noticing though she seemed to have an excellent intuition for building grammatically correct sentences, so I introduced the concept of parts of speech. We started with nouns, and initially (for about a day), I thought we were going to be stuck on this concept. The next day, she was pointing out everything that falls into the noun category and then telling me if it was a person, place or a thing. The next day she was explaining plural nouns to me and what it means. So now we are doing grammar everyday, because she reminds me if I try to skip that subject!
  
• Geography of the United States. We just started this subject, and plan on continuing this one through the summer. We are going to spend a week on each state (in order of their joining the Union). Our base resource for each state is our 50-state quarter collection. We joined the subscription from the US Mint when they first started, and have two wonderful binders now full of the quarters, postage stamps and great information on each state. This is a fun and educational tool for us.
  

Obviously we still have areas of struggle (especially math), but all subjects are seeing positive growth (some more than others).

I need to do another post soon about more of our resources and processes that we have been using this year. It is likely that I have learned just as much this year as Hannah has! My learning of course is more about process and outcome, and I am feeling more confident as we wrap up this school year and prepare for second grade!

OneMom