wine + apples: Lucas: Grade 1 Portfolio 2020-2021

Luc was very excited to begin his first grade year. What a year it was!

Luc is still in speech therapy for his speech delay, but he is progressing very well.

READING LOG:

Luc enjoys reading nature guides, such as Peterson's and others, but he did have a chance to read many other books this year.

MATH CURRICULUM:

Horizons Math 1

supplemented by MathSeeds (Reading Eggs)

LANGUAGE ARTS CURRICULUM:

The Good and the Beautiful Level 1 + Level 1 Reader

supplement: Reading Eggspress & Fast Phonics

HANDWRITING CURRICULUM:

Handwriting Without Tears Level 1

Daily Writing Notebook with Story Starters

SCIENCE CURRICULUM:

The Good and The Beautiful Units:

-Kingdoms & Classifications

-Mammals

Lucas learned how to use a microscope this year. We did microscope labs with live-culture yogurt and water that we collected from the lake in our backyard. We also stained onion cells and examined them under the microscope.

We grabbed some mushrooms from our neighbor's yard and made spore prints.

Here is a video compilation of what we observed during our microscope labs.

Video 1: Onion cells

Video 2: Lake water

Video 3: Live-cultures in yogurt

We also decided to start an annual conservation project for our homeschool.

This year, we put up bluebird boxes in our yard in the hopes that we could watch a bluebird pair nest and lay eggs. We had such a wonderful experience.

We named our bluebird pair George & Mary.

They laid five eggs, which all successfully hatched and fledged the nest.

Here is a compilation of our nest progress- from nest building to the messed nest.

We started tracking the progress of our bluebird nest with this paper nesting guide, but found that we could join Nestwatch.org -- which is run by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology -- to provide information that may be valuable for their research.

As our bluebird fledges were about to fly the nest, we discovered that a Carolina chickadee had nested in our second box. These are the eggs from her box. They have since hatched into four tiny chickadees.