Our First Day of School

Yesterday was our first day of homeschool using My Father's World Exploring Countries & Cultures and 1st grade.  Let me introduce you to my students.  Above is Caleb, in 3rd grade this year.  Yes, he has a broken wrist, that's a red cast you can see.  Thankfully, it's his left one!  He still loves vehicles and trucks of all kinds, and Legos!  He's finally reading for pleasure on his own and devouring books about the Titanic right now.  His favorite subject is History, while his least favorite is math.

Rebekah is excited to start 1st grade because she wants to be able to read by herself!  She loves doing workbook pages.  Her interests are horses and baby dolls.

Joshua is our 2 1/2 year old pre-schooler.  He won't just "go play", he must be at the table using his own supplies.  (Yesterday, he was stabbing pencils into his glue stick.)  He loves cooking and can often be found standing on a chair in the kitchen, usually getting in to stuff he's not supposed to get in to!  He also loves trains, tractors, and animals.  He did not want to get dressed, or hold a sign for our picture, he's 2!

And lastly, here's our sweet Matthew!  8 months and crawling and pulling up on everything already.  His interests are eating books and Cheerios.

This picture makes me smile.  All three working at the table.  Caleb is doing addition Fast Facts, Rebekah is doing her 1st grade workbook, and Joshua is gluing circles to a paper.

Matthew was doing school too, under the table!  Joshua dropped a pencil.

I was tired of hearing "can I have a snack?" ALL day long.  So, I decided we will have tea time at 9am, and 1:15 every day.  Now, when I hear that question, I just ask him what time it is?  I put our snack on a tray.  When we're done, all the dirty cups/napkins/etc. go back on the tray and we just carry it the kitchen and continue on with school.  I plan on showing them a picture of a famous painting or we'll listen to classical music during this time.

Fun with our pattern blocks.

Coloring maps!  Caleb did a geography pre-test.  He got 11 countries correct, which was more than I expected.  But he called the United States North America!  Oops.

They also filled out passport applications with a pretend check and put them in an envelop to be mailed to the government (aka mommy).  I had some stickers that looked like stamps too.

English was a story about a lion and a mouse.  I had Caleb narrate the story back to me and then draw a picture.

We also read the about horses and dogs from our Complete Book of Animals.

Rebekah filled out a calendar and did some math activities for her number of the day, 1.  And that was our first day of school!  I'll be posting weekly about our journey though ECC and 1st grade, come back and visit!