Gearing up...

Monday will be the first day of our new academic year - first grade and third grade, here we come! We met with our resource teacher today, coming away, as usual, with a huge armload of books. This afternoon I am putting together our work tubs - workbooks, blank books, crayons, etc., and putting the finishing touches on next week's lesson plans. I also need to check and make sure I put all my library hold requests in - Elf will start up with The Mouse & the Motorcycle next week, plus we'll start our nature studies with One Small Square Backyard, and we'll need D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths.

The meeting went really well. As usual, she asked me what I had planned, and then gave me materials to support my goals. I have heard that this is not the case with all resource/independent study teachers, that some are much more directive and forceful, so I feel grateful that I have such a good one! The class schedule is the only thing that bothers me this year - they changed it quite a lot from last year's... no Spanish for the little kids anymore, and instead of art and science on one day (which would have worked very well for us), they split them up and combined them with other classes. While my kids are fine with gardening classes, they don't care so much for music and creative movement - it's just not their cup of tea. So, Elf will have art and gardening, while the Fairy will have gardening and stories/arts & crafts. We do plenty of science here at home, so I am not too worried about that. Plus, with Mondays free, we can keep up with roller skating!

We also start dance classes next week. Elf is excited about tap, and Fairy is looking forward to her combo class. The homeschool 4H is starting up again soon too, and the kids are interested in felting, engineering (I think Lego), cooking, and of course the project I am leading - global arts and crafts. Maybe hiking too. Thankfully for our schedule, these classes are only once a month each. Plus we have field trips, and a drop-in homeschool gymnastics class, oh, and of course Park Day.... I think we're going to be very busy people, but busy in a good way! Makes me want to be much more organized!

Other than that, I am enjoying the reading for my Children's Lit class - fairy tales right now, and am deep in Frankenstein and other readings for my other class, which starts this Saturday. And now I am off to water the garden, which is wilting in the nearly 90 degree heat!

And it's...

Happy Not-Back-to-School Day for us! All the public schools in our area started up today, which by the way seems really early, especially since they are considering cutting 5 days from the school calendar to save money. Anyhow, it was a morning of children going past our house to the elementary school right down the street - clean, shiny, in stiff new clothes, with new notebooks loaded in their backpacks... I admit, as a child I loved the first day of school! I loved having all the new supplies, the new clothes, a good tan after a summer spent mostly outdoors, seeing friends I hadn't seen in a couple of months. I think that nostalgia is one of the (several) reasons we start back in early September. I do go out and buy new supplies - I have a thing for those unused, unopened boxes of crayons, packages of paper, and newly sharpened pencils. And yes, I will be buying new clothes for my kiddos, mostly because they have outgrown nearly all of last year's fall and winter clothing. They do get a first day of school of sorts, both here at home, and at the charter school we use for art classes.

But today, we are hanging out, watching cartoons, and having french toast. We unfortunately stayed up far too late last night, and as a result missed roller skating, but we'll still have a good day, not going back to school.

A Short Weekly Report...

Still pretty laid back this week, although we're progressively picking up the pace in preparation for a full return to academics the first week of September.

Elf:
He did a couple of pages of review work from Saxon Math 2 (pages we had previously skipped). One of them was an assessment page, on which I am proud to announce he got 100%.

He is now reading The Magic Finger, along with his daily dose of Calvin & Hobbes. He is writing a story (on the computer) about himself as a knight, and hand-writing in a Scholastic story-starter booklet about a lonely giant. He also completed another 3 pages in Explode the Code 4.

In addition, he has been collecting and trying to identify rocks of various sorts.

Fairy:
She has been working diligently on letter recognition. I printed out some basic letter pages from Learning Page, in hopes that writing the letters repeatedly will help her form that connection.

She has also done a couple of pages of math this week, both from a cheap kindergarten book I got somewhere and from Saxon Math 1. Her addition and subtraction skills are pretty sharp!

Both:
We finished reading the Gilgamesh Trilogy this week and are now shifting our focus to Ancient Egypt. We got Mummies, Pyramids, and Pharaohs, along with Pyramids! 50 Hands-On Activities from the library and will start with those on Monday, plus we will have more books coming in soon. I am hoping we can go see this at the end of summer.

Scientifically speaking, the kids, and M, are having great fun playing around with projects from The Science Explorer (a great book from the San Francisco Exploratorium). So far the projects have been quite easy to do, with no special items needed - I really recommend this book!

And there's our week!