Our "First" Day

And here's our homeschool crew. They hate when I make them pose in the sun. Those flowers were just so pretty and there's not that much color in the gardens right now.

Banana Boy is mad because he's not going to public school. This from a boy who, just the other night, made me promise never, never, never to send him away for school again. Whatever. After this picture, he and his little attitude had a hiatus on his bed until he could think of three GOOD reasons to homeschool. Lesson 1 for the day: Look for the positive.


Here is Sunshine playing nicely for 5 minutes on his school mats. I have to deliniate a space or he's everywhere he's not supposed to be--like an anti-Visa.

For his school today, he chose from about 5 trays I set up for him. The first tray he chose was his snack. I let him cut open the wrapper with a scissors. Good fine-motor skills work, right? The next time I turned around, he was cutting his granola bar (one of those breakfast bar-like a giant fig newton things) into pieces with the scissors. sigh.

Next he washed and dried the tray in a sink of soapy water under strict instructions not to wash any of the other dishes on the counter. That went ok.

Next tray was the pompons you see above. This remains a popular activity with him. He was supposed to pick them all up with that scissorsy bug catcher thing, but he was lining them all up and naming them after friends. Hey, it kept him busy for about 7 min.

Next tray was a shape sorter. He wanted me to sit down with him and play, and the girls were busy with some independent work, so I did. I was surprised to see that he recognized the clover-shaped piece and knew he'd already put it in. He opened the lid to show me. We talked through the names of all the shapes. He knows circle, square, star, clover, diamond and triangle. AFter he put them all in, I gave him instructions to put them in a certain way, which made my little control freak mad. After a bit of fruitless negotiating and some firmness on my part, he finally complied. Obeying instructions was that lesson.

When BB was done with his school, I set to work with the girls on A Child's Geography, a new book we're trying out. Maybe they'll be too old for it, but the first chapter seemed a little yawn to me. I guess they were impressed by the facts, which Voskamp neatly put into understandable comparisons for a child. For example, when she talked about the enormity of the circumference of the Earth, she compared it to the child walking 10 hrs/day, covering 22 miles/day. It would take almost 3 years to walk the circumference of the Earth at the equator!

The exercise we chose to complete asked the kids to draw their house (teeny) then their street, town, state, country, continent and the Earth. The girls found two slates in a pile of stuff I was organizing and are insistent on doing all their work on slates this year. Here is Pepper's work.

Notes about what we read:

Pepper's World:

(photo hopefully to come soon. I can't get it to rotate!)