It's that time of year again! Actually it's a couple weeks earlier than we normally start school, but we wanted to get a good chunk of school in before our fall family vacation. We had a pretty successful first day and we were all excited to get back to the books. This year is definitely going to be different with Baby Bear starting school. I will have all three to teach instead of two and they are all learning different things and using different curriculum.
I like to take our first day pretty slow and add some fun first day activities. I try to gradually work our way into a full school day routine. This year we began our morning with breakfast and showers and took our time getting started. Then we all sat down in the living room for a time of prayer. I've found that our school day usually goes a lot smoother, attitudes are better, and it's just an overall better day when we start it out by spending some time with the Lord. I hope this year to be able to keep up with morning family devotions even if it's just a short time of prayer. We thanked God for our school and asked for His blessing to help us learn, do our best work, keep our attitudes right, and to help us draw nearer to Him as a family.
After our prayer time we headed outside for our annual back to school treasure hunt. This is a tradition that the girls look forward to every year. Some years I hide new school supplies around the yard. This year we bought all of our supplies together, so instead I bought them each a coloring book that they can work on while I'm working with one of the other kids and some candy for a special treat. I hid them around the yard and let them search for them, then we took our annual back to school pictures.
Then we headed back inside so that I could introduce the girl's to their new books and curriculum.
This year Sis will be continuing with Heart of Dakota for 5th grade. She will be doing Hearts For Him Through Time: Creation to Christ. The first part of Sis' day will be independent work while I work with her sisters. She will be reading a history lesson and answering questions in a notebook. Then she has a history CD that she will listen to. She will also have a daily "Quiet Bible Time," where she will read a certain bible passage, spend a few mins praying about what she read, and learning a memory verse to music on a CD. Eventually she will have math worksheets and English assignments that she can probably do on her own too.
Boo will be using My Father's World: Adventures in US History for 2nd grade. This year focuses on learning about our country and learning about names. She will learn all the names of the states, about famous people and events in American history and for her bible verses she will be learning all the names of Jesus. Today we started learning the Pledge of Allegiance with a CD, practiced some reading, and worked on getting our timeline ready, which she will continue from last year.
Baby Bear will be starting to learning her alphabet. Letter recognition and sounds, counting, and joining us for art projects and science experiments. Today we sang the ABC song and learned the letter A. We hung the little poster we made on the wall. This girl was so excited to finally be a big girl doing real school with her sisters. She listened really well.
Each of the girls got a binder to keep their completed school work in this year. I let them each decorate a cover page for their own folder. We spelled their names out with stickers and then they used stickers and crayons to personalize their binders.
After we finished our work. We had a movie day and ate our candy. We watched an oldie "Honey I Shrunk the Kids." (on our Clear Player of course, which removes any language and inappropriate material. I'm very careful about filtering what our kids watch.) We will be visiting Hollywood studios next month and I wanted them to know the movie before we play at the Honey I shrunk the Kids playground. There are actually a lot of Disney movies that my kids have never seen, so we are trying to fit in as many as possible before our trip. Overall it was a good start to our school year. This year might be harder on me, but I'm praying that we're going to learn how to make it work and hopefully have one of our best school years yet!
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