1st Day of School

Now that the first two weeks of school are behind us...I'm finally finding time to blog about the first day! Yes, it has been that hectic...but next week promises to be more calm. Good thing too, since we're already a little behind where I'd planned to be.

Anywho. First day. The girls were up bright and early and ready to start their new school year. Waiting for them on the kitchen table, as always on the first day of school, was a sign waiting to be colored. Crayons on the left for my little preschooler...

...and on the right for my big (holy cow, how is she in THIRD GRADE?!) girl.

They worked on their signs while I made breakfast - cinnamon rolls, which are a special treat. Special treats also being customary on the first day of school.  :)

After breakfast, the girls were finally allowed to dig through the drawers of their "workboxes." Ours might not be the exact workbox system (especially since they're not boxes at all, but drawers), but they work for us - and Rachael had specifically asked to use them this year. If you're not familiar with the concept of workboxes, it's essentially dividing your subjects into separate boxes (or drawers) and letting the child have some autonomy, as well as decision-making powers concerning the order in which subjects are done. For us, we always start the morning with our Bible lesson. After that, the girls are free to head for whichever drawer they choose. Not all subjects appear in the drawers every day. Sometimes there are special treats or games inside. And some of the subjects include a note or page marker so that Rachael can work independently, while other times, she needs my supervision. Here are Rachael's drawers:

The numbers on the right are attached to the drawers by velcro dots. When she finishes with that drawer, she removes the number and sticks it onto a laminated card...when she finishes four subjects, she gets to choose a "special" activity from a stack on the piano. It could be watching a TV show, playing on the computer, etc. She looks forward to her "earned" break time and being able to choose how to spend it...especially when mommy-imposed breaks usually mean chores to be done.  ;)

Rachael actually got a new set of drawers this year, and Milly inherited her old four-drawer set. Yes, I'm aware that the numbers are off. Actually, we're not at all sure where the number three is, and I've yet to work up the gumption to make a new one. So Milly just puts the number two where she wants it. She doesn't remove numbers as she finishes drawers anyway...nor does she have as much to do in her drawers. There's an Explode the Code workbook, math (counting, patterns, etc.) worksheets and Cuisenaire rods, coloring books about numbers and letters, that sort of thing. But it's SCHOOL, and she actually gets angry with me when she runs out of work to do before her sister does.

Here's Rachael working in her Bible study workbook...still in her pajamas, of course. They didn't bother getting dressed at all, actually, until it was time to go outside and take pictures with their signs. Yes, another first-day custom. In breaking with tradition, though, we did not take the pictures in front of the tree in our yard - which was busy being overrun by hornets. We headed up the hill to the side of the house instead.

Rachael ran out of steam on the last line of her sign, penciling in a conversation that the letters were having with each other instead of actually coloring them. So hers is pretty much impossible to read in pictures. You know what it says, though...and didn't Milly do a nice job?

Our first day actually went much longer than usual - we had started at around 9 a.m. and, after breaks for lunch, pictures, and her "earned" break, we didn't finish up until a little after 4. We wanted to explore every single subject that first day, and it took much longer than we'd imagined...thankfully, other days are much shorter.

Their first day of school ended with their last swim lesson. (Last in this series; I'm hoping to get them into another session soon.) Both girls did great with their lessons - Milly is especially fearless about jumping into the pool. Going under the water doesn't bother her a bit, whereas Rachael was always careful to point her chin skyward in an effort to keep the water out of her face. Both girls are swimming with floats and supervision, and I can't wait to see what they'll learn next.

The very last thing they did in their class was to move out of the small-ish therapy pool, and over to the big pool. There, they were led to the diver's blocks at the end of the pool (seven-foot water!) and told to jump in - with an instructor waiting to catch them, of course. This is where Rachael had a panic attack. Not only does she not like jumping in, but now she was jumping from much higher than just the side of the pool. After much reassuring, though, and holding the hand of one of her instructors until she actually jumped...she jumped. I was so proud of her.  :)

Unfortunately - having been standing right behind her sister and hearing the theatrics, Milly was not inclined to jump when her turn came. It took even more reassuring and persuasion to get her up on the diving block, and I had to stand beside her and hold her hand while she jumped - and she DID jump! But I didn't get a picture of it, and I hate that.

Next time, we'll let Milly go first and I'll have the camera ready.  :)

Coming soon: We Got Practically Nothing Done During Our Second Week of School, But That's Okay.

Day #1 = Success!

Well, the big day came and went - and we had a fantastic first day of school! The girls were up absurdly early this morning because they were so excited to get started. Each of them found a sign at her place on the kitchen table this morning, and they got right to work coloring them while I made breakfast. Afterward, we went outside for our annual first day of school pictures. I still just can't believe that my Rachael is a second grader now! She's pretty proud of the fact, though:


And then there's my BABY, who somehow has gotten big enough (despite my demands to the contrary) to want to "do school" as well. I'm wondering if it's significant at all that she didn't color the letters on her sign at all, but rather the spaces in the center of the letters. Hmmm.


Of course I got one of the two girls together! I got about a dozen, actually. I like this one best. :)


After pictures, we went inside and got to work. Each girl has an age-appropriate devotional book that we'll begin our mornings with. Rachael's book asked her today to make a list of her family and friends that she wants to remember to pray for. She made a pretty lengthy list and didn't forget many people - immediate family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, even some friends' parents made the list! My thoughtful little girl.

She was a little apprehensive when I took out three books for language arts, but quickly came to the conclusion that this was "eeeeeeeeasy!" Princess Smartypants missed one word out of twenty on her fourth grade spelling list. Not that I'm proud of her or anything.

While Rachael worked on her language arts stuff, I moved over to Milly. We talked about the letter A and the sound it makes, and she took very seriously the task of coloring a big letter A:


We also read books, went on a scavenger hunt for different colors around the house, talked about the number one, and read the Bible story of Adam and Eve. (Her thoughts? "Ewwww, snakes!") And we sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" no fewer than ten times, although I'm not even sure now how that even came up.

Back in the kitchen, Rachael and I did some math review...she had been dreading math all morning, but was relieved to find that she hadn't forgotten place values or how to add after all. Read some from her history book, and read the first lesson in her health book, about how people are unique. One of the activities was to talk about the student's wishes for the future...so I grabbed the video camera. Whew, this kid is a wildcard - I never in a million years would have guessed that first answer! (Never mind the Milly background noise...)

As soon as her book work was done, Rachael rushed upstairs with a piece of paper and her new pink sparkly pencil to tackle her first ever book report. I had explained the concept to her this morning, and even jotted down a sample (title, tell about the plot, did you like it and why) to make it easier for her. And I told her that she had to do one book report per week, in her own free time and without being reminded, to be turned in on Friday. This, rather than reading a particular number of books (because the girl always has her nose in a book) is how she'll earn her Book It! rewards this year, and she wasn't taking chances on forgetting about it this week! Granted, it was a less than thorough review of Green Eggs and Ham, but I'll let it slide this week. It was a wonderful first attempt. Next week, I'll request that she review something a little more meaty. ;)

I also need to take a closer look at BookAdventure.com, which offers quizzes on lots and lots of children's books and allows them to "earn points and prizes for their literary successes." Sounds like something she'd love!

Finally, after her newly-mandated daily piano practice (not too much, mind you - she doesn't have but so many pages to practice), school was over for the day. We cleaned up and the girls went outside to play while I started on supper. I thought something special and fun was in order for two little girls who had done so very well on their first day of school, so I made pizza and...

...strawberry milkshakes. :)

One last special thing wrapped up our day - the iCarly doll that Rachael had ordered online with the gift card she won from the library finally came today. I picked her up at Walmart on my way home from a Girl Scout leader's meeting, and the girls got to play with her just before bed.

Inexplicably, Rachael insisted that Carly sleep with me tonight. I'm still not sure why. She said it was because I got it for her, and I reminded her that she had actually bought it. She said it was because she wanted me to be happy, and I told her that the smile on her face made me happier than anything else. But still...she insisted. So now Carly and I are going to bed, so we'll be ready for another beautiful day tomorrow at Regalia Academy. <3

'Twas the night before homeschool...

...and all through the house, not a creature was stirring...except for the mommy, who was printing coloring pages, browsing preschool curriculum sites and mentally gearing up to get back to work first thing in the morning. :)

My girls are both crazy excited to "go back to school" tomorrow. Milly thinks she's grown since she'll be "doing school" too - even if it is only pre-pre-school. She's mostly looking forward to playing with her new pink V-Tech laptop from Gramma! She already has a great handle on basic shapes and colors, so we'll be going over those this year, as well as learning letters and letter sounds, numbers, etc. Lots of books and songs and rhymes and art projects. I'll be piecing together a very loose "curriculum" for her from ideas on two websites - Letter of the Week (which focuses mostly on letters and numbers) and Hubbard's Cupboard (which focuses primarily on the Bible.) Both of these sites are just amazing - they have fully planned out, year-long preschool curriculums for several age groups, and there are a ton of fun ideas. If you have a little one at home, check them out!

Rachael was a little more apprehensive about the first day of school. She had it in her mind that she'd forgotten everything we'd done last year, and that she would have a test and not know any of the answers. I have no idea where she got that idea, but I assured her that there would be no tests on the first day of school! In fact, most of our first week will be spent on refresher material. But then, she's a lot like me - just having new books, even if they're school books, automatically equals fun. :)

One big change may occur at Regalia Academy this year...I'm contemplating a switch from the traditional August/September through May/June schedule to a more year-round schedule. Six weeks or so on, one week off, repeat repeat repeat. The regular breaks would keep us from getting burnt out on schoolwork, and the lack of a huge break during the summer would help us maintain a sense of normalcy. All three of us girls went a little crazy this summer with no sense of routine at all. The only big problem I have with a year-round schedule is my own little touch of OCD that requires clear-cut beginnings and endings! More about that when I reach a hard and fast decision...

For now, I'm finishing up my plans for tomorrow morning and looking forward to a fresh new school year!

What would have been...

Originally posted on August 19, 2009

Today was the first day of school in our county. This morning, I would have set an alarm to wake us all up early, gotten Rachael dressed and fed and driven her a couple of miles to the absurdly large elementary school - the same building where I attended middle school and my mom graduated from high school. I would have dropped her off at the door of a kindergarten classroom and (undoubtedly) cried like a big ol' baby all the way back to the van. Then I would have had a fun day playing one-on-one with Milly, who would probably have adored having the spotlight solely on herself. All day long, I would wonder...what is Rachael doing now? And eventually, I would cut Milly's nap short to jump back in the van and go retrieve my *sniffle* big kindergartener from her first day of school.

Instead, we all slept until about 8:00. We didn't rush through breakfast. We started school in our pajamas. We even went outside in them. We did our schoolwork at the kitchen table, drew pictures, played Math Bingo, and stopped for hugs and tickles as needed. She learned new things, and she had fun doing it. Rather than being her first day of kindergarten, it was her third day of first grade - because that is the level where she belongs, where is competent yet challenged. We had a great day of school together.

However, knowing what would have happened today has made me remember the discussion that first slung us haphazardly onto the road to homeschooling. Gene and I were sitting at the kitchen table one Sunday afternoon when Rachael was about a year - maybe a year and a half old, reading the newspaper. There was a feature story that week about an area homeschooling family, but I hadn't seen it yet. So I was caught completely off-guard when he told me, "I think you should homeschool Rachael." I was speechless. Homeschool? Homeschool?! But but but...homeschooling was for hippies and zealots and weirdos, and *gasp* what about socialization?! I told him that I would think about it.

And I did think about it. Every time I read about the merger of the county schools that was happening then, and wondered what the more crowded conditions would mean for my child, I thought about it. When I read about the below average test scores in our area schools, I thought about it. When I read about a little guy being caught in one of our schools with a knife in kindergarten - kindergarten! - oh yes, I thought about it.

Eventually I started thinking...I could do better than that. I could keep her safe, give her one-on-one attention, customize her curriculum to her needs, abilities and interests, and very likely provide better socialization than she would receive in a classroom anyway. I started thinking that, no matter what we taught her about God at home and at church, she wouldn't be hearing about Him at school. And as she got a little older, I realized what a bright little girl she was, and thought that just maybe, she would be bored to tears in elementary school the way that I was as a child.

While I was thinking and reading and researching, I was also praying. Was homeschooling really right for us? Was it consistent with God's plan for our family? I had always assumed that, once my children were in school, I would go back to work to help supplement the family income. Children are, after all, expensive little things. It didn't take long to find peace in the conclusion that one can't put a price on the well-being of her family. This time spent with my children is costing us a bundle in terms of lost income, but the benefits are priceless. The more I learned, the more I prayed, the more confident I became in the decision to educate my children at home.

In June 2007, we attended the Home Educators of Virginia (HEAV) conference in Richmond. I was amazed and inspired by the speakers at the workshops (especially Joy from Daughters 4 God - I want to be like her!) and could hardly wait to "do school" with my own daughter. We started exploring curriculums and quickly settled on a few things for preschool. We started that fall, when she was about 3 1/2, and preschool was lax at best - as it should be, I think, for such a little one. "School" was largely interrupted in December anyway, with the arrival of her baby sister, and then Christmas. Still, she read her first words on her own in January 2008, just before her fourth birthday. She progressed so well and loved learning so much that we made the decision to go ahead with a kindergarten curriculum in fall of 2008. And that is how we've come to be starting first grade at the same time that she would have been put into kindergarten in our county school system.

I started school last year with the affirmation that it would be a "year-to-year basis", that we would reassess at the end of each school year to see if it was working out well for all of us. By the end of kindergarten...well, I honestly don't recall pausing to reflect on whether or not it was working. I was already too busy deciding which curriculum to use for first grade. :)

With each passing year since that initial, shocking suggestion, I've learned more about homeschooling and become more comfortable with the idea - not just of homeschooling for the first few years, but indefinitely. Of course, if circumstances arose that would mean her learning better in a different environment...well, we won't muddle through just on principle. We'll do what's best for our children. Right now, homeschooling is undoubtedly what is best for them. I've also met more homeschooling families...and found that they're not hippies or zealots (or just plain weird) at all. What they are is dedicated and helpful. Their children are sociable, friendly, and smart. And I love being one of them.

First Grade - Day One: SUCCESS!

 

Originally posted on August 17, 2009

 

Rachael officially started first grade on August 17! Even though I thought I had planned too much for our first day...it was an absolute success.

We started out with a breakfast of blueberry waffles. Absolutely essential to the learning process, you know. Then she decorated her "first day" sign and posed for a picture before getting down to business.

I'm organizing our daily lessons with "workboxes" - an idea stolen borrowed from a homeschooling mommy friend's blog. Someday, I'll actually read the book on how workboxes are supposed to work...but for now, a very simple version worked out quite well today.
 

Ignore the junk in the background. That room is a work in progress, after all. Anyway...each box has a permanent number (on the left) and a removable number, stuck on with velcro. Inside each drawer is one subject that we'll cover that day - everything that we need for that lesson is inside the drawer, down to pencils, crayons, etc.
 

As we finish the lesson in a drawer, she removes the velcro number and sticks it to these handy little holders. There are actually ten spots, so she gets two "extra" activities thrown into the mix. Computer time is shown here - she also has the option to watch one show on TV. I need to come up with more ideas. Want to see what was inside the drawers today?
 

Drawer #1 will always be her devotional Bible, along with the day's memory verse and words to whatever song she's learning that week. (Yes, she already knows "Jesus Loves Me", but this week she's learning the second verse. I'm also hoping Milly will pick it up from hearing her sister sing - goodness knows she's picked up every song that Dora sings quite well, so I'm sure she's capable.)

Drawer #2 held our math book today - only the teacher's manual, as we only did review of place values and addition. She did a full worksheet of addition problems and had no trouble with the adding - only remembering which direction to write her 2s, 5s and 9s. She thinks it's absolutely hilarious to write her 9 backward - making it look like a P - and then informing me that "OOPS, she just P'ed in her book again!" We'll be doing more adding tomorrow, only in columns instead of horizontally. And of course, more working on that pesky skip counting by fives.

Drawer #3 was Language Arts. LLATL is awesome in that it's broken down into daily lessons already - no planning needed. Today's lesson consisted of reading a poem, talking about it, underlining the nouns in the poem, deciding which sentence went with a picture, reading several short words, writing a sentence, etc. It didn't take long at all, and I'm really looking forward to doing more tomorrow!

Drawer #4 is a great example of what workboxes can be for bigger kids - a completely "do it yourself" drawer! Love this little lined white board we found in the $1 bin at Target. Stuck to it are a list of her eight spelling words for this week, with instructions to write them on the board. I'm loving the things she can do by herself and have me look at later!

Drawer #5 contains another stolen borrowed idea - the Nature Journal. The first item of business was decorating the cover. Then, she took her binder and colored pencils outside with instructions to "find something in nature and draw it." She chose to draw her pet box turtles, Ruby and Felicity. Wonder what she'll choose tomorrow?
 

Hmm, this drawer looks suspiciously like the last one. This binder, however, is for her unit study on The Book of Virtues. Once again, she decorated the cover first, and reviewed the vocabulary words (philosophy, development, disciple, passion, appetite and reason) that we started on last week.

Believe it or not, I was trying to start slow today...so drawer #7 was kind of filler. I finally printed out the information for her Girl Scout Shape Up! patch and started documenting her physical activity time. We got off to a good start by having a big ol' dance party in the living room for half an hour this afternoon. Gotta love the 90s music channel!
 

Finally, drawer #8 - which will always be the last drawer of the day and will always contain this little black and white journal. This is Rachael's "end of the day" journal. I'll start a few questions in it for her each day, and it will be up to her to finish them. Unlike in her workbooks, I won't be offering spelling help in her journal - I want her to write her answers the way she thinks they should be. Mostly, I just want to have these years from now to go back and see how cute her answers were. :)  Today's entry was as follows (my words beginning, the bolded words at the end are hers, spelling errors included):

"My first day of first grade was FUN.My favorite part of the day was drawing in my journal.
Tomorrow, I hope we do ART.
I am proud of myself for doeng it."

Okay, okay, I did help her with the word journal. She asked and said she really wanted it to be right. Besides, it was written right on the cover if she had thought to look. ;)

Once school was over for the day, us girls headed off to let my mom thoroughly spoil the grandbabies. Rachael got her choice of restaurants for dinner (pizza buffet at Cici's) and Gramma picked up all of the still needed school supplies from Target - down to a pink baseball and pink tennis balls to use as part of upcoming science projects. She also got a new movie (Barbie and the Diamond Castle) and book (Fancy Nancy - The Show Must Go On) from Gramma, who tends to go a little overboard but mostly justified it this time. In the interest of fairness, Milly also came home with a new book (DORA) and coloring pad (DORA) to help keep her busy during school time. :)

All in all, we had a great first day. We got so much work done in so little time, and Rachael absolutely loved the freedom of deciding which box/drawer would be opened next. The only big kink I still need to work out is finding more things for Milly to do during school time - sure, I could print out DORA coloring pages all day long, but come on. Even that will get old eventually. I assume. I recently exhumed Rachael's old PowerTouch Baby (the Fisher-Price version of the LeapPad) with all its books and cartridges from a tub of outgrown baby toys, and have it ready to go for tomorrow - maybe that will keep her entertained for a while. If anyone has ideas on how to keep a 1-1/2-year-old happy during school time, please share your insight with me