First Day

Our first day of school went really, really well.  Both kids had a lot of fun!  We started the day with our new morning routine that I am determined to keep doing.  Every morning K has 4 things that she has to do before we start school.  I got this idea from a homeschool blogger (Jolanthe at www.homeschoolcreations.com).  She does 5 things, but we are only doing these 4 things: brush your hair and teeth, make your bed, get dressed, and pick up your room.  K did this really well, and fairly quickly this morning.  I’m hoping this will stop her room from becoming a crazy disaster, which often happens.

Circle Time - We started school by talking about the calendar.  K already knows a little, but she doesn’t know the days of the week very well.  She constantly asks what day it is, so I think it is time she learned.  We will go over the days of the week until she knows them really well, and then we will move on to learning the months.  We then talked about the weather and the seasons.  Every week we are also learning a new song, and K and E both loved this.  We sang This Little Light of Mine from a Veggie Tales Sunday Morning Songs cd.  They wanted to listen to it again and again.  They danced around the loft while we listened to it 5 or 6 times. 

Reading, Math, Phonics – Today we started Lesson 41 from the Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading.  K is doing so well with reading now!  Today she learned about double consonants at the ends of words: fuzz, Bill, egg, etc.  She had no problem with it at all.  After reading we did the first lesson in Singapore Earlybird Math Text B.  This did not take very long, and we could probably start doing more than one lesson a day.  She wanted to keep going, but I figured since it was the first day we would keep it light.  For phonics, K is doing Explode the Code 1.  She did the consonant pre-test at the beginning of the book with no problem at all.  She will start the actual book tomorrow.  While K and I were working on all of this, E was coloring, doing a Melissa & Doug puzzle, and dumping his crayons on the floor and putting them back in the box. :)

Game/Snack – Every Monday and Friday, I am going to have some type of gross motor skill activity for the kids to do.  Today we did bowling.  I had bought this for about $6 from Target a few weeks ago.  They both did pretty well, but E liked to just throw the ball instead of rolling it.  He ended up always knocking more pins down than K, and she did not like that.  For snack today we had string cheese and pretzels, while they watched Little Einsteins and the Golden Pyramid to go along with our Geography lesson about Egypt.

Geography – We found Egypt on our big wall map, and then on our little blow up globe.  K and E then colored maps of Egypt that I had printed from www.worksheetworks.com, while we listened to the Northern Africa song from Geography Songs.  I had K color the Sahara brown, trace the Nile in blue, and circle the capital city in red.  E just scribbled on his map, but he likes to be included.  Then we looked at our atlas and read a book about Egypt that my grandma had brought back from there many years ago.  I read that book a lot when I was young, so it was nostalgic to see it again.

Science – We read two pages from the Usborne Children’s Encyclopedia.  K learned about continents, the atmosphere, days and years, and what the Earth is made of.  Then she answered two questions on her worksheet from Sonlight Science K.  She loves the Children’s Encyclopedia, and looks at it all the time.  I think this science curriculum will be a really good fit for us.  

Read-Alouds – Today we read The Bee Tree, a poem from A Book of Poems, and some nursery rhymes from Mother Goose.

And that is day 1!  I am not going to normally go through what we do each day, but I wanted to remember what we did on her first day of Kindergarten.  I will put up some pictures at the end of the week.  Below are all of the items we used today.