First Day of School

We enjoyed our first day of school on Tuesday! The kids feel right at home in their classroom (pun intended)! Seriously though, they are eating up all of the little "beginning of the day" procedures we've put into place--like saying The Pledge, changing the date on the calender, etc.. The big kids like feeling like they are in "real" school (you know...as opposed to all the "fake" stuff we've done the last two years)!

We don't yet have all of the materials to begin fully. We're waiting on our box of supplies from Calvert for the little ones, and long in information for A+LS for the big ones. We're tired of waiting, but it's one of the concessions we have to make as Epic works out the bumps in getting started their first year. We have received 3 of the 4 laptop computers (which are very nice).
Until we have everything to get started on their actual curriculum, we have been doing filler activities. Lots of vocabulary, and math review with the big ones; pre-writing skills, alphabet hunts, and counting with the littles. [We're searching for "A" this week!]
Each day after lunch I've been having a lot of fun teaching them music. For some reason I've never done this with my kids. You'd think with a degree in music ed (specializing in early childhood music) this would be the last thing left off the schedule, but it's just....different, teaching my own kids. Still, it's pretty cool to see how much I remember. I've discovered that all of that teaching goodness is still inside of me, has just been waiting for me to pull up the file. The kids have especially enjoyed our music lessons. We've started basic, learning the difference between beat and rhythm and pitch, and practicing simple patterns in each of those areas.

I've learned the last three years of homeschooling not to try to set up a schedule from the beginning. These first weeks of school are about figuring out what works for us. By around the 6th week of school I figure we will have melded into a schedule that we can put in writing and start to really depend on. We're all looking forward to a great year in Pre-K, K, 3rd, and 5th grade!