First Day of School

June 08, 2013

First Day of School

Happy first day of school! I know you're all celebrating summer vacation, but we're getting used to being....different. We're doing what works for us, and we're going to try year round school this year (with a large break for Christmas).

First day of school

Kara's new desk. I put the list of what we're doing for the day on her chalkboard. I still need a chair....

I'm so looking forward to this year!

We started this year with prayer, a hug, and then our Bible lesson.

Next we read our books on wolves and did vocabulary and spelling.

Learning how to use the new dictionary for our vocabulary words. So much of her life she'll be looking things up on the internet (which we'll learn also), but she still needs to know how to look things up in a book.

Then we did writing. We're going to try to improve her handwriting this year. A lot of work will be done on the computer, but we'll be sure to spend a little time each day on one letter at a time. Today we began at the beginning! Letter a - print and cursive. Then she "wrote" a story on the computer. She picked wolves as the topic. The grammar wasn't perfect, but that's something we'll perfect by the end of the year. Right now she needs to just write and write and write.

Writing is so much more fun for her when she doesn't have to "write!" She's so creative, loves books, loves stories, always has ideas, but doesn't like writing with pencil and paper. I put her in front of the computer and she flew! I sure hope this continues to make her so happy.

She kept going and going....

We talked about rocks and soil during science class. We used this great book from the library. She was really interested in this subject, actually, thanks to Minecraft. She had questions for me that I didn't know the answer to!

Our first grammar lesson - capitalizing with M.I.N.T.S. (thanks, Pinterest, for that idea) and nouns

We just reviewed a bit with math. She is very good at math and today was a bit overwhelming being the first day, so we reviewed, odd/even, doubles (4+4, 5+5, etc.), double plus 1s (4+5, 7+8, 3+4, etc.), and number line. We're going to use number lines quite a lot this year - we're going to touch on negative numbers, we're going to do timelines a lot in science (life of a frog, etc.), in social studies, and along with all our books we read.

Art - primary colors

We started our own color wheel

Then drew a picture of a wolf using only primary colors

I'm really happy with how today went and Kara's feedback was:
* We both LOVED having zero worksheets
* She wants even more on the computer

Here's to another great year!

First days of school over the years: