First Day of Homeschool 2009

Well, we've made it through the first day! And it was a great one! Here's a little play-by-play starting with the night before:

10:30pm: I start trying to pull all our books together, making copies, and creating Schultutes, a German gift tradition for the first day of school. I end up in tears a few times because things are not coming together and I'm exhausted. But I plunged through, got it all worked out, and finally at
1:30am: went to sleep, after taking a photo of our coffee table with things sitting out for the morning!


7:30am: Woke up before the kids and started breakfast! I thought I'd have a late-sleeping baby but he was up before his sisters! They all got dressed, ate pancakes and fresh fruit smoothies, and were very anxious to open their Schultutes:

They were filled with school supplies...new pencils, markers, colored pencils, fancy colored pencils, pastels, stickers, and a pencil box, with a few Starburst candies (they get to eat one when their schoolwork is done each day this week)! I also tied a little note to each package. They enjoyed the special words from Mommy.

Baby wanted in on the fun...all morning!
8:15am is about when we started (didn't look at the clock).

We read the Mrs. Applebee story from Serendipity. I couldn't get it to download but it worked well to just cut and paste the story from the blog into Word. I shrunk the images a little, but left them there so they could look at the pictures.

We also listened to the Flower Fairy CD, and will read the above book, "The Life and Times of the Apple" throughout the week.


I also printed out the color page for the Apple Blossom Fairies off of the Flower Fairy website. I let them color it with markers, but in the future I think I'll require colored pencils. We'll find some other more appropriate uses for markers, if the markers survive long enough! Markers never last long around here because the tops are always left off or the tip is bitten off by baby.

We also read the little story of St. Ann from "Miniature Stories of the Saints."


Ellie wrote some "A"s.


and Mary Clare started writing the "Angel of God" prayer as copywork.


We used Crayola Model Magic to make a capital (Ellie) and lowercase (MC) letter A. They are drying on the fireplace and we plan to put a ledge up in the schoolroom for the whole alphabet!


And since I'm not finishing this until after our second day of homeschooling, I'll add in our favorite activity from today...Art! We looked at Cezanne's apple still life paintings from our "Child Sized Masterpieces" set and then I got out apples for everyone to draw with colored pencils on sketch paper which I cut into small squares. The only problem was dodging the apples, when the toddler decided he needed some attention and started hurling them across the table! Oy, it's going to be a fun year with him!


Things have been going well so far, I'm hoping to stick with this program to make for a fun and exciting school year!

Hope you're all having a terrific Tuesday!