Start Of School!

We finally started school today! Our plan was to start on Monday, but Mel had the stomach flu on Monday, and we couldn't get the printer to work, so Monday didn't happen. Steve stayed home on Tuesday, and nothing work-related happens when Daddy's home; there's just too much fun going on! Something about "the best laid plans..."

 

So, Wednesday was our day! We had our first gymnastics class in the morning (pictures to come!), so we came home, changed our clothes, and jumped right in!

 

We HAD to have our turn holding the "first day of school" sign! Even if I quickly wrote it with a marker on posterboard!

I plopped Evelyn on the step next to Bella for a sister shot, and it actually turned out well!

Focusing hard on her Letter Hunt activity!

 

I wasn't sure how she would act with me as her teacher, but she went along with everything really well! We did a "Days of the Week" song and motions for our Bible verse; she listened well and did the activities that I asked!

 

All done! I had a few "live and learn" moments as we went through our activities. I'm wondering if some of them aren't challenging enough for her, but we'll see how the rest of the week goes.

And this is how Evelyn spent our school time. Our schedule was off this morning because of gymnastics, but I definitely learned that from now on, school has to be done while Evelyn is napping. My conversation went like this, "Okay, Bella, now you need to find all of the a's in the story. Evelyn, stop grabbing the markers! Evelyn, no! Good job, Bella, keep going! Evelyn, you're driving me crazy! No, no! Alright, Bells, next...Evelyn! No, no!" Lesson learned.

 Matching shapes and apples

 

Tracing the uppercase and lowercase A's

Our verse for the week. We have motions that Bella will actually repeat! Score!

This is one of her daily activities - she traces the letters for the day of the week, colors in what number it is, and then writes the number in the box. She's also supposed to write out the number "fourteen" for the day, but that seemed complicated for her, so I'm re-thinking it. I learned through Bella doing this that even though she's good at counting and recognizing numbers, she's not good at writing them herself, so that's definitely something we're going to work on.

My lesson plan for the week. I downloaded and printed a resource called "Letter of the Week" lessons from the blog, Confessions of a Homeschooler. I like it because it includes all of the skills she needs to learn this year, focused around the letter of the week that she's learning. It also gives ideas for additional activities.

Yes, we changed outfits halfway through. Bella wanted to wear one of her new dresses that had foxes on it. On this page, we wrote out the time (I took a BIG mental note that she has no concept of how the clock works, etc., and I had trouble explaining the difference between hours and minutes.)

 

I had to include this picture, because it just cracked me up! The idea is that every month, Bella will write our her name on the line, and at the end of the year, we'll get to see how she improved. When she wrote out her name in the space next to August, all I could think of was, "Man, I hope she gets better at writing on the line, or my control freak is going to twitch!" Something else to work on...lowercase, uppercase, and the concept of writing on those lines with the dotted line that runs through the middle!

 

Our first day great and she was asking for more activities to do!