Homeschool, Day One
Guys.
Today was our first day of homeschool. The kids were out of their mind excited last night. Neither could sleep, even with melatonin. I’m not sure how many times they woke up during the night. 100? 1000? Both are fair guesses. Exhausting as it all was, it was pretty cute to see them so happy.
We started our day at 9:00. Our deal is you have to be in your seats, with all your supplies, by that time. Comfy clothes are okay, stinky teeth are not. We do have some standards. They began asking to start the day at 8:40. Their gift is persistence, so I think we actually started at 8:58. Or something. I had about two sips of coffee at that point. You can’t ask for too much before that.
I’ve been preparing for this day for months. The teachers and staff at their former school (sigh) have been wonderful about sharing resources and grade-level information. I attended a homeschool moms group and went to a learning night at the Homeschool Building. I’ve downloaded I Can statements, common core standards, and printed lots and lots of good stuff from Teachers Pay Teachers. I created accounts for them at Khan Academy (which is awesome, by the way). I bought 46,000 supplies at Target (a surprise to no one, I am sure).
The day went really well. We started with calendar work. I bought the kids a monthly planner, mostly thinking it would be good morning work to find the date, write in any events for the month, and learn a little time management. We moved on to writing, learning to properly write a letter, address an envelope, post it and mail. We talked about how postage works, what kind of stamps we use, how the Post Office works, and the value (and fun) of sending “real mail.” I’m telling myself we covered writing, spelling, grammar, and social studies (communities and how they work). This all aligns with CCSS M.1.2.A*.
(Are any of my teacher friends twitching yet?)
The rest of the day didn’t go exactly as planned. I learned it was best to work on one subject with one kid while the other worked independently, so I had to move the order of things around a bit, but whatever. I worked on math with one kid (thank you, Khan Academy) while the other worked on DOL and then read. Anderson started his paragraph of the week and Stella worked on a morning work worksheet (thank you, Teachers Pay Teachers).
The rest of the week will be more of the same, with the start of our unit on energy, a trip to the library, and some serious work on our Spanish. As we move closer to our travel dates, we’ll begin unit studies on the places we’re traveling to.
I am tired, guys. Parents of kids in school, bring their teacher a huge gift tomorrow and tell them they rock.
* I totally made that up.