Starting 1st and 3rd Grade - A NEW BEGINNING

Today is our OFFICIAL first day of school.  I have been so excited to see how the year goes now that many burdens have been lifted for Alli and I.  

Jill is starting 1st grade, and she loved doing LOTS of school today. She already knows the numbers to 10 and most of her letters (since she has sat next us for the last 2 years as I was TRYING to teach Alli.) So today she learned about the days of the week, using a calendar and her first alphabet story - about KQPW - King, Queen, Prince and the Wise Woman.  These girls LOVE being told stories!!

 Below is a story Jill wrote on her own.  We sounded it out together, and she spelled it all on her own (except ph for /f/ and she didnt know what V was).  I never knew that learning should be fun and relatively easy.  Jill's 1st grade year will be MUCH different for us.

(Alli was being the teacher and she wrote STORE (Story) and Setins(Sentence)  - she seems to be lacking that blended /n/ sound in words (like thak for thank).

Alli is going to learn about the Old Testament for 3rd grade so today's story was about God and the angel Lucifer. 

 You cannot really see in the picture above, but we wrote 3 sentences with 15 words.   To contrast this I took a picture of our LAST story from 2nd grade about Elizabeth.

Some comments:  

6 MONTHS AGO (on the left) - It took her 10 minutes to write both sentences.   The sentences take up the entire page.  She could not read this sentence herself.

TODAY (on the right) - All three sentences took her 3 minutes to copy down, her writing is TINY and she read me the sentence without help. 

This is going to be a GREAT school year.