First Day of School 2011

The summer went by so quickly!  We started the year early to make me feel better about skipping school most of December....honestly, how much real learning goes on in that month at school anyway? Still, starting early gives us flexibility.  I've tried to get my head around the new stuff that we're adding this year but you never know how things will go until you actually do them.  It's also a transition since I'm starting preschool stuff with Lincoln.  I made up a schedule that I thought was really good but didn't work.  Most of that was because I had some "grammar" to work on with Coralee which left the little ones with too much time on their hands.  She was also a little upset that her cousins had just left and I couldn't blame her.  There's no such thing as enough time together.... and my cousins only lived in another state not on another continent!  We started the day off with a Bible study/discussion about diligence (one of my weaknesses is making sure that's always a part of our day) & praying.  We did our calendar stuff and then moved on to Geography.  We're working on the "Great Circles" of the Arctic Circle, Tropic of Cancer, Equator, Tropic of Capricorn & Antarctic Circle.  I had Coralee copy all of the words which took a good bit of time.  Lincoln was a little antsy waiting for her to finish that.  Then we took time to do handwriting.  I had read a good large motor skill practice was to have kids erase their names off of the white board.  He used his fingers to trace and did pretty well.  I should've realized he couldn't do stuff on paper but tried anyway.  We'll be using something else tomorrow.  Coralee, on the other hand, did well.  We're working on re-learning how to write numbers correctly.  Laziness about that made her have issues with writing 6's backwards.  Amazing how starting in the right place fixes that.  I sent Lincoln & Lauramae to play for a little bit and then had them come back to do Lincoln's phonics/letter recognition.  Coralee read to Mae at that time and then we read about Shakespeare.  We finished the day with Math.  Lincoln got to play with pattern blocks while Coralee worked on her first assessment.  Made me realize that I made the right decision on skipping the first few lessons.  She made a 100 on it with little effort.  We'll definitely do math last since she does so well with it.  Reading causes us attitude issues.