First Day of School

Our first day of school didn't go as I had envisioned it or as planned but it worked out ok in the end.

I had hoped to have more of our curricula planned and organized. But I have enough to make due until I can get the rest of it done. In the meantime, I just have to wing the subjects that aren't planned.

It would have been nice to start the school year out with all of our curricula purchased but there's nothing I can do about that except start what's missing when we get it. Currently, we are waiting for our drawing supplies, Korean, Spanish, and a video editing program.

I wanted to get our school room cleaned up and organized. That didn't even come close to happening. Between postpartum issues, nursing issues, heat waves, and caring for a newborn, I just wasn't able to get it done. So, when I woke up this morning, the school room was a mess and the table was covered with junk. The kids helped get the room picked up and cleared away. Together, we picked up the floor, straightened the bookshelf, put away the library books, straightened my yarn/project box, straightened the games, and cleared the table. Scott put our infant swing together so I could try it out with Madelynn. We need batteries but she was happy enough with occasionally pushes by Sam and I. It was enough to get started.

I had hoped to treat my kids to wonderful, homemade cinnamon rolls. A plugged milk duct and fussy baby made that impossible. They'll have to wait until later in the week.

Despite all that, our first day of school worked out ok.

I started by explaining some things that we are planning on doing differently. It's not a huge difference but still important to know. Then we moved onto problem solving. It was a quick easy lesson; I'm just going through some basic introduction for the first couple of weeks. I showed them how to take a very hard looking problem...

1/(1x2) + 1/(2x3) + 1/(3x4) + 1/(4x5) + 1/(5x6) + 1/(6x7)

And reduce it to the simplest fractional form but looking for a pattern. Even Mika, who hasn't learned enough fractions to do it, understood it with some simple explanations on adding and multiplying factions.

After that, we did our first lesson of math. Then we tried our hands at our first Venn perplexor. That one got Sam crying because it wasn't quite as easy as he thought it would be and both kids, who wanted to try it by themselves, got it wrong.

Then Mika went off to begin her first video making lesson while Sam and I did grammar. During this time, Josh woke up so I had Mika read to him a book that is part of his preschool plan.

Finally, we all took a break while I nursed Madelynn. After the break, Sam and I started on his first cooking lesson, which was on eggs. He learned how to hard-boil eggs which we turned into egg salad sandwiches and deviled eggs for lunch.

Sam with his first deviled eggs.

We also managed to read our first sections of science. It was on dinosaurs. After that, we listened to our first story for history on CD.

That was our day. We'll round out our required hours with Sam doing PE and both kids doing some independent reading. Both kids are very into the Warriors series right now. Mika is also reading the Seekers series by the same author.

I'm also trying to do some preschool prep with Josh. That didn't go over all that well today. The problem was trying to teach older kids, work one-on-one with Josh, and take care of Madelynn all at once. It didn't work. Josh did color a coloring page for the letter A. I recited Hey Diddle Diddle (the nursery rhyme) to him several times and he can plug in a couple of the words. He also listened to two library books with cows in the story being read to him. Finally, he wanted to play with scissors. With each successful cut he declared, "Me did it!" Being a homeschool mom, I couldn't let it go...I had to correct his grammar. LOL