Our first day of our new school year...

Pics to come...

We started our 2008-09 academic year yesterday, and overall I think it went quite well. We started together, filling out the date on a calendar and marking a sun for the day's sunny weather. After that, I asked the Fairy to recite the days of the week, and the Elf recited months of the year. We read through our new poem (Sing a Song of Sixpence) and worked on memorizing the first verse. Then, the Elf did a page of copy work, in D'Nealian styling as a transition to next year's cursive, while the Fairy worked in Handwriting Without Tears.

After that, the Elf wandered off for his free time while I worked one-on-one with the Fairy in math and language arts. She did a page of Saxon Math 1, followed by listening to the Tale of Peter Rabbit. She drew a garden gate with a capitol letter "A" in her main lesson book (a blank book used in Oak Meadow), and did one side of a phonics worksheet on the letter "A".

We then switched - I set the Fairy up with Starfall, and brought the Elf into the livingroom for one-on-one lessons. He did a page of math, followed by a page of phonics (which I am starting to think we could get away with skipping this year), and then we read from "The Tale of the Jolly Robin". The Elf drew a picture of a robin in his main lesson book, complete with a tree branch to stand on and a juicy pink worm in it's beak. He wrote "Jolly Robin loved to eat angleworms." under the picture. He then completed the other side of his math page - a review on number families.

We then took a break, had a snack, and got started on our world travels. I showed them the earth (thank you Google Earth!), and where Australia is in relation to where we are. They colored a map and flag page while I read from our children's atlas and then from a book of children's stories - "Rona and the Moon", which is a tale from New Zealand about an angry woman who curses the moon and so is taken up into the sky, where you can see her when the moon is full (look for the rough outline of a woman holding two water gourds on the face of the moon).

And that was our first day! I did have a few grumbles from each child. And there was some dawdling over written work, but we got everything done that I had hoped for! Hopefully some of our library books will come in by this afternoon - I plan to stop there just in case on the way to my mom's house, where the children will spend the night, go swimming, and have a good time in general.

Today's plans include science (oceans/seashores); more math; finishing the letter "A" with the Fairy (we're going to draw a cabbage for the lowercase "a"); reading about Australia in the book Children from Australia to Zimbabwe; and a few other miscellaneous activities.