First day of school!

Elijah started school today. We ended up home schooling him. A few weeks ago when we were praying for the tuition money, we had parts go out on the car and the motorcycle and our washing machine died... plus we didn't get any extra money, so we took that the Lord wanted us to home school this year! :) I admit I cried some about it, but we're trusting the Lord in this decision, so we broke out the home school books and set up Elijah's room.


We are going to try to start mid-morning each day with calendar time and math. Then I have to teach my class at the high school 2 days a week so Brant will do a little activity with them those days; the other days we'll do art, PE, history, etc. After lunch and the little boys are down for nap, I'm going to do reading with Elijah.

Math we're doing Saxon 1. I had bought the kinder curriculum and totally didn't like it, so traded it for grade 1. It's very manipulatives-based, which is great for the little boys - they can play with the manipulatives while I work with Elijah. (We'll see how that goes!) For reading we're doing Sing, Spell, Read and Write. I've had a lot of friends do it and like it, so we'll see. It's a train-based theme for kinder and a race car based theme for 1st, so I think it will go over well with the little boys. :)
Once a week we're going to get together with friends to do science, social studies, art, etc.... whatever activities we come up with. Caleb has a special coloring book that is his "school book" that he can color while Elijah is doing his worksheets; once we get more into the swing of things I have a couple pre-school books for Caleb to do too.

One of my fears today was the boys were going to be really disappointed with "home school." We've read lots of "getting ready for kindergarten" type books and they all involve going to really brightly colored classrooms with lots of paint and clay. :)
But the boys were SO SO SO excited today. Major hyperness last night and this morning. Brant took Elijah out to get a donut for breakfast... tradition my parents did with me and my siblings on the first day of school. Also gave them a chance to talk about obeying the teacher. :):)

So here's some pics of the day...





We will have a lot of tweaking to do in the routine. It took Elijah FOUR hours to do all his little worksheets... I think he had 3. But he talks NON-STOP and I couldn't get him to be quiet and actually do his pages. He seemed to have a lot of fun though. We'll see how it goes tomorrow....