First Grade Materials Arrive!

Today we got a large box of things from Rainbow Resource from an order I placed last week. Rainbow is wonderful for curriculum materials. They are always happy to answer questions and the catalog is HUGE, the size of our capital district phone book. We now have almost 90% of what we need for next year. Since we are following a classical style of education First Grade is devoted to the Ancients. I have found several items used, mainly teacher's manuals, but there were things we needed to buy new and a lot of math "manipulatives". We are starting with a new math program for first grade called Saxon. It looks good and there seems to be a lot of practice which I think is best at this stage. Maddie was as happy to dig into the box as we were which was wonderful. She immediately played with the unifix cubes and checked out the pattern blocks. Brian started going through the Harmony Fine Arts program. We also got her math workbooks, the next phonics workbook and 2 Science books. In keeping with our Ancients theme science will be all about the physical world: 10 weeks of animals, 10 weeks of the human body and 8 weeks of plants. Being a "science kid" Maddie is pretty well versed in these things already but hopefully we can find new things to discover. We also got a Summer Bridge workbook which looks great. It has daily activities to help keep her mind sharp as well as a section on nutrition and physical activity and a reading list. My favorite part of the whole thing was a chart to measure how big you are now to compare it with measurements at the end of the summer. In fun items we got a learn to play chess set and a Nature Log for Maddie. Perhaps the Nature Log will help keep the collection of pinecones down this summer...perhaps not!