Little Hearts For His Glory, Unit 1

This year, we are using Heart of Dakota’s Little Hearts For His Glory curriculum. 
It is adaptable for children ages 5 – 7.  To read more about our choice, CLICK HERE.

Alex is 5 years, 7 months as we begin our school year.
He will turn 6 in December 2013.

We are using History for Little Pilgrims and History Stories for Children, as recommended in LHFHG.

Alex is learning right now that history is HIS story – the story of God’s world!

For the sake of being incredibly honest here, I will say that THIS has been the biggest adjustment for Alex.   The first few days of LHFHG history are important, but rather uninteresting for an average 5 year old.  It’s been very difficult to keep him focused.  I’ve had a couple of suggestions to use the coloring book that goes along with this text in order to give Alex something to keep his hands busy while his mind listens to me read.  He’s not the type of kid who chooses to sit & color, but we may try that just to see if it helps.

Finally, on Day 4, he was interested in the map of the continents.  Other than that, it’s been quite a struggle to keep Alex’s attention.  The readings are short – maybe 5 minutes a day – but kind of dull.  Totally unlike anything we did with MFW K.   It gets more exciting, and Alex WILL adjust, but we were definitely “homesick” for the fun style of MFW for the first day or two or LHFHG history.

 

We are using the Family Time Bible and Devotions For The Children’s Hour.
Memory Work often has corresponding music from Hide ‘Em In Your Heart Volume 1 CD.

Our Bible verse is Matthew 19:14,  “But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” (NKJV)

singing our Bible verse song (I put the CD on my Kindle, so we could easily listen to it.)



LHFHG has some FUN activities for helping kids remember their Bible verse!  Between the Hide ‘Em In Your Heart CD and Carrie’s fun activities in the manual, I think Alex will do well with Bible verse memorization this year!  We played ‘basketball’; each time that Alex (and Mom…we worked together) recited the Bible verse, Alex got to shoot a basket!

We are finishing All About Reading Level 1 – and (in 2014) moving on to level 2 – this year.

(This part is almost identical the the AAR update I posted earlier this week…)
On our first day we played the Silly Sock matching/reading game, and then Alex read to me from the Unit 22 fluency pages.  Since we left off All About Reading in late May/early June, I see a VAST improvement in Alex’s reading ability.  Just using what he learned in the first 21 lessons, he’s become quite the reader in the past few months!  He still has more to learn, but his confidence in reading is very obvious!

Adding a sticker to show his progression through the lessons…

Going through a word flipper book & acting out the words…

SLIP!!!

one of the few actual worksheets we’ve seen so far in AAR 1

We are using Singapore Essential Kindergarten math along with activities in the LHFHG manual. 

(Please keep in mind that I have the older version of LHFHG, and if you purchase a new guide, your math will follow a different sequence than what we are doing.  I created my own spreadsheet to match the math activities in the older version of LHFHG to the lessons in Singapore Essentials.  It’s not perfect, but it will work for us!)

We started out in Essential Unit 4, which is far too easy for Alex, but I wanted him to have a gentle start.  He actually really enjoyed these simple pages!  He is working on counting & writing numbers 1 – 5.  It really doesn’t hurt him to have extra practice at neatly writing his numbers.

We are using The World God Made along with activities in the LHFHG manual.

We talked about how the earth travels around the sun.  I was the sun, and Alex (Luigi!) was the earth.  He travelled around me, and then we sang “Happy Birthday” each time he made one trip around the sun.  Hopefully this will help him remember that one year passes each time the earth travels around the sun.

We are using Happy Handwriting and Rod & Staff ABC series.
 

We are trying to go in Kumon order with handwriting.  They order the letters by how they are formed, so all of the straight line letters will be first.  These pages are fun because they have a little poem that tells you how to make the letter.  You also use the poem as a letter hunt, circling all the L and l in the poem.

Rod & Staff “Do It Carefully” book

We are using mainly Thornton Burgess books for storytime this year,
as recommended in the LHFHG guide.

Our current book is The Adventures of Reddy Fox.  We are reading this together after Jensyn goes down for her afternoon nap. Both of my boys are anxiously waiting to find out what happens next!

This collage goes along with our history, to remind us that JESUS is the center of history!

We are using calendar printables from Mama’s Learning Corner for Alex’s Calendar Notebook.  A calendar notebook is not part of LHFHG, but I think calendar time provides good practice for number writing, days of the week, weather, etc. 

Alex had to trace & tell me today’s date.  Then he circled today’s day name, circled tomorrow’s day name, circled the month of the year, wrote the year, and circled the season.  On the following page, he circled today’s weather and circled his current mood.  It’s all in page protectors so we can complete it with vis-à-vis or dry erase markers.  (We will likely begin to use some of her other calendar pages as the year goes on, just to change things up a bit.)

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