Whew! We made it. Our first full week of school has finally been completed. I always have big dreams and big plans for the first week of school and then by the time Thursday hits I feel like we are lucky to still be alive. (Okay, maybe not that dramatic, but darn well close.)
If you saw my curriculum posts you know that this year we have kindergarten, 5th, and 7th grade all happening in my one room school house known as my living room/dining room. Due to this huge age and educational gap we have to be creative about how we are getting everything accomplished. The way we are doing this is that we start the day with kindergarten because it only takes 30 to 45 minutes to get through. This also allows me time to get things like laundry, chores, and other household necessities. After lunch I get my 2 year old nephew down for his nap and the kindergartner settled with a quite time activity. Once they are settled we dive into the 5th and 7th grade group work. Once we are done with group work we move into our independent subjects.
The only day we deviate from this schedule is on Wednesdays when we go spend time with our homeschool group at the park for a couple hours. Then a couple of times a month we also used Wednesday afternoons to visit the library.
Here is a bit of what we were up to this week.
Kindergarten
Kindergarten has 2 weeks of introduction that helped Madilynn become acclimated to a dedicated learning time. This 2 weeks introduces the creation story from Genesis 1 and 2 as well as introducing numbers as well as the letters of the alphabet. There is a fun “creation book” that Madilynn made and we practiced the alphabet song several times.
This week we also took our trip to the library where Madilynn got her first library card! Up until now she has been using my card because children aren’t given library cards until they can sign their own names, which is usually around the age of 5. Now she is so excited that she gets to pick out her own books, stand in line and hand the card and books to the person behind the counter rather than waiting on me to do it for her.
5th and 7th Grades
While the first week of school is usually pretty crazy in terms of trying to figure out our routine, the amount of course work is light so we are able to ease in somewhat. This week we began by discussing the northern and southern border sates of the United States. The kids each labeled the northern states and colored them all the same color on Monday, then on Tuesday we did a sort of pop quiz to see how many of the northern states they each remembered. They did the same thing on Wednesday and Thursday with the southern border states.
In Science we began our study of physics and chemistry with a discussion on matter. We read through the text book, played a couple games of “20 Questions: I Spy” that taught the kids that everything they could “spy” takes up space and therefore is matter. Then on Thursday they each did a worksheet that focused on density to be added to the portfolio.
Independent work saw the 5th graders diving into new units in math on Beast Academy online, working together on a fun poetry study, and beginning their writing program with a lesson on following directions. Both of the girls are enjoying the things they are learning and they also both chose new chapter books at the library to do their first book reports on in a couple of weeks.
Collin’s independent work threw both of us for a bit of a loop. While I knew we were diving into more writing and a more intensive program I realized neither of us could really be prepared for what was coming. However, we took the bull by the horns and dove in ready to go. The grammar and writing programs had Collin focusing on parts of speech and being able to summarize some small excerpts of various writings. Math is a continuance of the work we had been doing but I was impressed with the amount of information he retained and was able to continue without the need to go back and review too terribly much. We also began our first book study and already Collin is seeing a connection between this book and a read aloud we read last year. This is going to be a fun book study to go through together.
So there it is, our first week of school at a glance. I am really glad that we are getting back into our routine and this year is going to be a lot of fun to go through. Thank you for joining us on this journey! Check back next week to see what else we have done!
A Wise Woman in Progress 