First Day of School

Yesterday was our first day back at school after a long break through the summer.  The kids were very excited about it.  E can't believe she's old enough for 3rd grade, Z is now in Kindergarten and working with us each morning, and H is now officially a preschooler. 

Since I have so many littles who are old enough to pay attention to me for more than 1 minute, we've started doing a preschool program with them called Little Saints.   We'll see how long this lasts, but for now it is fun! We sang songs, read stories and poems and even did some finger painting.

We have also tried out a new system for scheduling and planning our days called Loop Homeschooling.  This is originally an idea from a lady on the Well Trained Mind web forums.  The idea is you school for a set ammount of time each day (for us, 4 hours).  When time is up you stop and clean up.  The next day, you start where you left off. So if you stopped just before you got to history and science (story of my life.. we never got to the fun subjects last year).... then you start with those first thing the next morning and proceed in a loop or cicrle through your subjects eah day.

Here's what we did:

K:

math, phonics lesson, the letter F in handwriting, latin video lesson 1, history: the Phonecians, veggie tales coloring page, played with a microscope

preK:

Little saints day one:  poem, fingerplay, if you're happy and you know it, video interviews with the kids, finger painting.

3:

math (trying out saxon this year... I found a copy for very cheap.  We'll see how it compares to our other standby Math-U-See), spelling, handwriting, latin, grammar in FLL 3 (i really like this book), Writing with Ease (I also really like this book... we did the mastery test for level 2.. i think we'll start in the last 4 weeks of level 2 and then move onto level 3), Religion, History.

My wonderful 3rd grader made breakfast (fried eggs), and the kids also cleaned their room, had a long play time at the park, read on the couch for 45 min of quiet time, and read the 4th chapter of the Incredible Journey with dad at bedtime.

A fun day. A busy day.... But what else can you expect?