We enjoyed our first day of school yesterday — first day of Kindergarten to be exact. Except that it wasn’t really much different than what we had been doing. I did want to mark the day as special, though. Snap a few photos and celebrate learning.

We started the morning with pancakes. Olivia often asks for them for breakfast and I admit that I don’t often make them on a weekday. In hindsight, it might have been easier than my normal breakfast routine of making everyone their own, albeit, quick food. One meal just seemed to go faster even if the prep was more involved.

Our schedule right now totally revolves around Thomas’s  nap. So once he went down in the morning (I can see us schooling only in the afternoon later/next year) we got started. I had made the kids schultutte — a German tradition of a cone of goodies — to celebrate the first day. Olivia’s included markers, fresh watercolors, a couple of Crayola activity books, M&Ms, a white board with primary writing lines, a pencil case, ABC stamps and stamp pad, a pencil sharpener of her own, and some stickers. The dollar spot at Target was very helpful in filling this out. John’s was on a much smaller scale with glue sticks (he goes through about one a day some days), watercolors, and stickers.

I borrowed the idea to take photos of the school girl holding her sign from my cousin Pam. I love to see the differences in her kids each year and wanted to do the same. Olivia hammed it up, but we got a couple of photos that really show the beautiful young lady she is becoming. I thing she was enjoying the attention.

After some time to play with their new loot we settled in to our morning block of lessons.

  • We started with reading. We are already well into our reading curriculum. She is reading words with the short and long A, short and long I and short and long O sounds. 
  • For math she built the Montessori Teens board and then I asked her to build various teen quantities for me from the beads. If I asked her to build fifteen, she had to place a ten and a five bead on the mat. 
  • Science included a reading of Are You A Spider? We then completed some Did You Know? booklets about spiders for our science notebook. She dictated her facts to me to write down, then she cut and folded the booklets and pasted them in.
That concluded our morning block. It took about an hour, but there was much down-time between subjects. I am working with getting her to transition from one thing to another without getting distracted in a long, drawn out project.
After lunch came round two:
  • We had our read-aloud time. Selections included two Bible stories from Genesis, Humpty Dumpty, The Old Woman and the Shoe, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Math in the Bath, and Corduroy.
  • Next was music and movement which was enjoyed by everyone from Olivia to Thomas. 
  • Finally, T went down for his afternoon nap and we snuck back out to the school room to enjoy some marble painting. We made spider webs in black and since we were having so much fun we tried other colors as well.

All-in-all it was such a great day. I do believe most of my plans are going to work as written. I have a few snags I want to work out, but our rhythm will only improve as we go.

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