Surrounded by Treasures: The First Day

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Monday, August 29, 2005

The First Day

Debi asked in a comment on my last post (this is my third post today. Yes, this is the same person who didn't post for, what, a week? Shut up) how our first day of school had gone. I feel kind of dishonest calling this our first day of school, because like most homeschoolers (and many families in general) our days all involve learning, some more purposeful than others -- but it is only during the school year that we have "sit-down school" as I call it, where we, well, sit down, and do regular subjects one after the other like people at regular school do. Anyway.

The first day has gone really well so far. We read our two chapters of Exodus, made animal classification collages:

... had a good talk about who came to California when and who was here first (tomorrow we'll go to the library after school and get some good books about this subject, and start studying California Indians before we move on to exploration and missions and all that fun stuff), had our book discussion, played geography games, and did all the usual journal writing/printing practice/math worksheets kind of thing. We had a half-hour of free reading (my favorite time, even though the rest has been fun) and a half-hour of playing catch, wherein both kids made progress. I am definitely not a stellar example of What To Do Right When Throwing And Catching, but somebody's got to do it. If they can just learn the basics, practice will help a lot. I hope. If not, I'll enlist someone (like the neighbor boy who, at 11, is adept and coordinated at every physical thing I've ever seen him do) to help. The kids have been really cooperative. The day took from about nine-thirty till three-fifteen, including break and lunch; the collage project took up a lot of time.

Today was a pleasure, in other words, and I'll cherish the memory of it when I'm having a tear-out-my-hair-and-run-for-the-hills day. Or I'll try to remember it, anyway, as something other than an impossible fantasy.

Posted by Rachel on August 29, 2005 02:23 PM in homeschooling

Comments

Sounds like a great day!!!

Posted by: debi at August 29, 2005 04:29 PM

Awesome. You know, I just thought how wonderful it must be to be learning yourself (for you particularly not as much as other homeschooling moms or dads) while teaching the kids. I'm sure you have a cariculum you follow, with workbooks and text and all that and perhaps it isn't always stuff you've remembered? I think I would enjoy that aspect of it, learning along with my children. Another thing popped into my head too, why is it that we only learn about the states we live in? Like as a kid in social studies, we only learned California history (not to say we didn't study world or US history as well), but we didn't have like the history of Montana or anything like that. I think it'd be cool to learn about every state in depth.

Posted by: jenn at August 29, 2005 08:49 PM

Jenn: Yes, it is fun, both to remember things, and to learn new ones (the proportion of things learned to things remembered will shift as they get into more advanced subjects, I'm sure). What's most fun is to see my kids latch onto subjects and learn, and be excited about it. As far as sources, some things I do just from memory, but mostly we use books from the library or reliable Internet sources, combined with textbooks for subjects like math where it's important to learn concepts in a certain order.

When LT was in... first grade? second grade? I made up reading comprehension worksheets for him, one for each state, with basic information like nickname, date of statehood, notable facts, etc. We started with Hawaii and moved east, and got to around Kansas before we finished the year. I decided that rather than start up again the next year, we'd wait and start over when C could do them also; we'll do them next year when we study U.S. history, and we'll probably do them in order of admission to the Union. With C being an advanced reader for her age, the two of them can do a lot of things at the same time.

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