The First day of the 2009-2010 School Year!

Today was our first day of school for the 2009-2010 school year. The kids were all very excited and welcomed the changes in curricula that I made. They started the morning by picking some tomaotes from our plants that seem to be everbearing.
After they came in from picking they stood by the front door so I could take their 1st day of school pictures. As you can see they were all very happy about it.



After pictures we headed into our school room and I took this picture.



We then went over the objectives of the year and the class rules.
They were raring to go so we dove right into the things.
Here's a rundown of how the day went.

We started with Science and completed the week 1 day 1 lesson for REAL Science Odyssey Chemistry level 1. They were really excited about starting Chemistry and had a blast learning about how all of their favorite things are all made from chemicals. After spending an hour on science we moved to the living room, had a snack and started our read aloud. The kids choose to have me re-read a favorite from last year, Half Magic by Edward Eager. After the read aloud and snack we moved back to the school room where Lucas played with math manipulative, colored and had quite an adventure with the playmobil roman soldiers. Everett and Annika worked on Geograpy, Math, Language arts and penmanship. Annika had so much fun with her new McRuffy math and LA programs that I had to reign her in a bit so we wouldn't go too fast. We did take a break around 12:30 and had some lunch. Annika had finished all of her work before lunch so she and Lucas worked on setting up a restaurant with the play food while I finished working with Everett. Ev had a lot of fun with Phonetic Zoo, which is his new spelling program, and was very happy to have only missed 2 words on his quiz. He and I had a lot of fun working on the first Keyword Outline from IEW's All Things Fun and Fascinating.

Over all it was an excellent day and I was amazed at how quickly we were finished. We started about 9:30 and wrapped up the day at 1:30. The only thing left for the day is for Ev to do his free reading. He asked if he could read it as a bedtime story to us all later. I thought that was an excellent idea, so later on tonight we'll all listen to him start reading The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan.

For all still on summer break have a great one, and for those that have jumped back into the pool that is homeschooling I wish you luck.

Work Binders

After some more thinking I've decided that workboxes won't work for me. I have however adapted it to be a "Work Binder" Basically I'm giving each child a binder with 8 tabbed pocket dividers These have 2 pockets (one on each side) but I thought this would take up much less room than workboxes.




So what did I do with all those drawers I bought? I left them right where they were an repurposed them as art paper and supply drawers. It's worked out great and the kids are really excited about their binders.