Start of 4th grade

Yep, today is the start of 4th grade for my baby.  Though I’m sure he doesn’t want to be called a baby anymore. 

We always start off school with some brain teasing questions to get those juices flowing. 

Then we head to spelling.  This year there are 20 regular words and 5 challenge words (last year it was 15 and 5.)  On Mon is the introduction to the words (I say them and he has to write them down how he thinks they are spelled); Tues is the alphabetizing and writing a definition of each word; Wed is the pretest (this year he is allowed to miss 3 words and not have to take the test); Thurs is writing a sentence for each word; and Fri is the test (unless he gets 17 or more correct on Wed).  This week is words that use “kn”, “wr”, “gn” or “mb”.  So the words are: knot, know, unknown, knit, knob, kneel, writing, wrist, wreck, wreath, wrench, wren, sign, design, assign, climb, thumb, limb, comb and lamb.  Challenge words are: bologna, lasagna, align, cologne, wrestler.  He did rather well on the words today.  He missed 7 regular words and all the challenge words, but he has the rest of the week to learn them, so I’m not worried.

Then we did handwriting.  He is learning cursive this year.  We started with learning the lower-case a and then the upper-case A.  He was so excited to be learning cursive.  But he says it is hard work and it makes his hand tired.  We aren’t going to be learning them in ABC order, like we did with printing.  We are going to be learning letters that have similar writing patterns together.

Then we did language arts.  Today he had some worksheets on nouns – identifying nouns, replacing nouns with more exact nouns (i.e. replacing the word “place” in a sentence with “cave”), common nouns vs. proper nouns and learning about singular and plural nouns.

Then we did reading.  Today he had worksheets.  He was practicing reading a story and picking out the facts (as opposed to opinions).  We are continuing the practice of free reading days again this year.  I’ve got a book list that I’m going to try to get him to pick some books off of so that he continues to expand outside of his normal boundaries.

And we finished up with science.  Today he was reading about Planet Earth.  It was the intro of what will be a quick review of the solar system, which we studied later year.

Overall, I thought it was going to be a hard day since we are out of our normal routine, but things went easily.  I’m crossing my fingers that it stays that way for a long while.