First Day of School

Well - we did it! We started school today with one 3rd grader, one 1st grader, one early preschooler (Goose is 4 but his late birthday makes him more of a three year old pre-k'r as he won't start K stuff until he's 6), one toddler and a six month old.

This is our first year trying a whole boxed curriculum and we're doing the 2/3rd grade year of My Father's World - a one year introduction to American History and a brief overview of the states. The program this year is called Adventures in My Father's World. I'd love to stick with MFW for the long run - but I'm experienced enough to know that I don't even know what this year will look like let alone several years down the road! So one day, week, month and year at a time! But so far it looks good.

So a few highlights from our first big day of the 2010/2011 school year:

Just to test my resolve to start the year today my sweet little Girly Pie decided to get horribly sick. She was up a few times in the night and even threw up once. I had hoped that was a fluke (she's working on 2 year molars and the throw up was after a medicine dose), but today the poor thing has had a temperature of around 102+/- even with ibuprofen and threw up again at one point. I would have sacked school normally, but for reasons I'll go into later I really do need to start in a timely manner this year. And for the most part GP wanted nothing more than to be cuddled up on the couch watching Dora the Explorer. She also took a long morning nap so I used that time to get school stuff done, too.

So while Girly Pie was parked on the couch (and for much of the morning Goose too - because when Dora's on how can you tell the four year old he can't watch it!?) we did school stuff. One of the things I like about MFW is that they start the year off at a slow and easy pace - which is great for us and even more great considering how my baby girl felt today! So we didn't do any math or spelling or language kind of stuff today. We just did history, Bible and art, plus some fun intro activities.

For Bible this year we'll be studying the names of Jesus, so this week is just a fun intro to names and their meanings. So we talked about names and looked up the meanings of names of people we know. Tomorrow we'll go into more detail on the meanings of Punky and Finny's names in particular. Sorry - no pics of that activity, but it was fun flipping through our baby name book looking up friends' names!

For history today we set up our timelines, put up the first couple of timeline figures and started our U.S. History Notebooks. The timelines were fun (the focus of the year is U.S history so that's why the timelines are not terribly long and why they cover such a short span of time) and I can tell the boys will enjoy filling in both their notebooks and their timelines with some great work this year.

Another really fun part of MFW is their "Book Basket" time. I just keep a basket stocked with library books from their list in the back of my instructor's guide (the list is even broken down week by week so I can easily make my holds ahead of time and just pop the right week's worth of books into their basket) and the boys have a set time of the day when they are to just sit and look through those books. Punky can read, Finny is still working on it, but even just flipping through fun picture books of the historical topics is fun. They enjoyed that part of the day today, and I've planned for their book basket time to be a very focused time for me to spend with the littler guys. Today that meant mostly Goose since Girly Pie napped so early. So we just read and did a fun alphabet activity during that time.

My Hubby has Mondays as office days at home, so he was around for our first day. He is working on the keyboard here learning a new tune while the boys work on their book time and Goose shows off his clipping activity. Goose struggles with holding pencils, crayons, eating utensils (everything really) properly and with any strength, so we're doing a lot of activities this year to strengthen his hands and improve his "three finger grip," including this chip clip activity. He is so cute and so proud every time he covers the bowl with the clips. And even with one a few scattered tries at it he is already much better and coordinated with the clips. He may actually be able to hold a crayon by the end of the year! (which by the way is my big goal for my little third born man - my goals for Punky at age four were unfairly higher and way less exciting for my little first born man, but you live and you learn, right?)

The unanimous favorite activity of the day was the Patriotic Snack. We layered yogurt, strawberries and blueberries in glass cups for a red, white and blue treat. Everyone loved dishing up their own cups and even Daddy enjoyed the school treat.

We also did art which both big boys loved! It's the "I Can Do All Things" book by Barry Stebbing. We'll see if the excitement lasts but so far I think it's a good fit.

Little Bug was asleep for most of our school time, but when he was awake he was as delightful as ever, scootching around the house and getting into everything we left on the floor - smiling and squealing with delight.

So that is our first day of school in a nutshell. I know the days will be filled to the brim soon enough as we add in math, spelling and the rest, but I still hope to be done with school stuff by 1:00 every day - I think it's doable and so far it looks like much of the work we'll be doing is enjoyable for all. I have been so excited to see what God has in store for us this year, and so far - even with a sick one in the house - I'm as encouraged as ever. Hopefully the updates continue to be happy! ;o)