Our First Day of School

Our Back-to-School pics...We couldn't leave out Baby Bear  :) 

Over all our first day went pretty well, although we had a slow start. I am NOT a morning person and never will be. The two things I dislike the most in life are going to bed at night and getting up in the morning. If you try to speak to me before my 3rd snooze I tend to be not so nice. So seriously, hats off to all you Moms who wake up early full of joy praising the Lord.  For a long time I felt guilty for not being a "happy morning Mom." After many failed attempts at trying to be something I'm not, I've learned to accept the fact that for whatever reason God made me nocturnal. Last year we failed miserably at our school start time. It lasted only a couple weeks. So this year we set more realistic goals. Another reason I love homeschooling: we can start whatever time works best for us instead of having to be up before the sun to catch the big yellow bus. We plan to start school early enough each day to be finished with lessons and chores by the time Dad gets home from work. 

We started out our first day with a little meeting about what to expect this year. Last year I introduced morning routine charts to help them get ready for school on their own. They loved those, and they worked great until all the magnets started falling off. Within a few months they were useless! This year I found a similar idea on Pinterest, but I'm hoping these will hold up better. I put each girl's name on a foam door hanger with foam stickers, then I wrote their "to do" items on clothes pins. After they complete an activity such as brushing teeth they move it to the "done" side. So after explaining I gave them 15 mins to complete all the tasks on their hangers. The rest of the year they'll be expected to complete their morning tasks when they first get up before we start school. Also each girl has her own school clothes basket, which I fill the night before with an outfit for the next day so that they know where to find clothes in the morning to complete their "get dressed" pin.

 

After our meeting and hangers, I introduced Boo to her morning board. We did our calendar and other activities on the board. This is Boo putting her first straw in her place value cups. She will add one straw to the "ones" cup every day. When she gets to 10 we will bundle them up with a rubber band and place our bundle in the "tens" cup. When we get ten bundles of 10 we will add them all to our hundreds cup and celebrate the 100th day of school!

We also sang our Days of the week song and This is My Father's World. I found these cute posters at the dollar store (love that place!) to help her sing along. 

Here's a link to our My Father's World song and video on Youtube, which our curriculum suggests. The girls loved this and made me play it 3 times. We will listen to it every morning for a while until they know it.

This is My Father's World

Next we did a  "First day of school" interview for our portfolios. I always get a laugh from some of the answers we get on these kind of things. I'm thinking of using this same sheet in the years to come so that we can see how the answers change. Here's a link if you would like to download a copy for your first school day. Click HERE for free download.

Then we had our annual backyard back-to-school hunt. Our tradition is to hide new school supplies in the backyard and have a treasure hunt for them. This year we put each girl's supplies in a new backpack so they only had one item to hunt for. They were so excited to find these though. I had another mom ask me what my kids actually use a backpack for. The answer is TONS of things! We take them to church, road trips, overnights at Grandmas and just to play with too.

We tried to keep book work light on our first day. We all did our Bible lesson together. Then Sis and I did her first Apologia zoology lesson outside in the backyard while boo tried out her new colored pencils and jumped on the trampoline. 

Tomorrow Boo will start her 2 week unit on Creation and Sis will get to start her new math and spelling books. Day one was a success. I'm sure the excitement will wear off pretty quickly, and I'll be dragging them out of bed too in a few days. For those following, I plan on updating our blog after each unit. We start out with a 2 week unit on Creation followed by weekly science themed units after that.

 After school we celebrated our first day by spending the rest of the day at our County fair with friends.