First Day of School (2010-11)

August 16, 2010.  Homeschooling at our house has officially started for the year!  And what a kick off it was.  I sent the kids to bed last night with promises of wonderful surprises at breakfast and a fabulous day together.  It was all I had hoped for, even though the really cool looking back-to-school snacks I stayed up til one a.m. making looked more like colorful dog droppings than crayons and the kids thought the peanut butter, honey, and powdered milk snacks mixed with red food coloring looked like raw hamburger rather than pink school erasers.  But they were tasty and, along side the blueberry muffins, the kids thought they had finally made it to Paris, France (the place, in their minds, where you go for fabulous, fancy food).  Kids who eat a concoction of oats, flax, and dried fruit for breakfast six days a week are easy to please.

mathwire.com

I set the table and stuck a candle into each of the kids' muffins.  I had wrapped their little school-supply boxes filled with brand-new supplies up in festive wrapping paper, and my husband and I sang a goofy little "Happy First Day of School" song to them as they entered the dining room.  It was the perfect start to the year.  The only thing that would have made it better would have been a few more hours of sleep!

After breakfast, devotions, and chores, I sent my 4-year-old, Sierra, off to play while I spent the first half hour of "school time" working with my six year old, Logan. Logan tends to loose focus early on in the day when it comes to school work, but his reading and math are my top two priorities for this year, so I've decided to attack those first.  If the baby is cranky or the rest of the day falls apart, I will at least have those two things done.  We snuggled on the couch for our ten minutes of reading, and he got through an Alpha Phonics lesson that made him laugh out loud.  Something silly about a hen falling into a bath, I think.  He took his Explode the Code out onto the deck while Sierra and I read the Dr. Seuss's ABC book and decorated the Aa page in her alphabet notebook (an idea I got from the Homeschool Share Website). Although Sierra has somehow managed to teach herself all the letter sounds and how to read simple words, I am going to start pretty basic with her.  We may mover pretty quickly through the alphabet, but I want to make sure she really knows it thoroughly.  For math, we used the measuring links and measured a pile of her toys, estimating their lengths and discussing the concepts of longer and shorter and the importance of measuring.

Then we all gathered back together and did some group work:  Read a poems from A Child's Garden of Verses by Stevenson, calendar work which includes lots of counting and discussion about tens and ones, and filling in our weather graph that I swiped from mathwire.com.  We then moved on to our history lesson.  I had gathered several photo albums and we sat on the couch thumbing through them and laughing at ourselves throughout our brief little "history" together.  Then we read the first chapter of History for Little Pilgrims, which gives a good introduction to the concept of history.

Lastly, we did a little music lesson.  I am going to use some ideas from a book I picked up from our local library book sale called Music Crafts for Kids (Music Crafts for Kids: The How-To Book of Music Discovery).  Today we talked about how nature provides a music of sorts.  We went outside and listened to the wind and the birds.  Then we made streamers to dance in the wind with by tying long, multi-colored strips of crepe paper streamers to the ends of wooden spoons.  The children danced joyfully around the house for close to an hour, the wind blowing wildly at their streamers, and it was the perfect end to a wonderful morning.  As we sat around a lunch of chow mein and rice, it was declared a success by all!