Our First Day!

"...Be strong and courageous, and do the work. Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the LORD God, my God, is with you. He will not fail you or forsake you..." 1 Chronicles 28:20

I was up at 6:15 am, showered and dressed by 6:30 am and then I had my cup of sweet nectar...coffee. Danny awoke at that time while Camille slept. I allowed Camille to sleep for a little while to give Danny some individual time. At 7:00 am, I awoke Camille and filled my nectar cup and checked my email. At 7:15 am, I told the kids the bus would arrive at 7:55 am to take them to school and they needed to eat breakfast, brush their teeth, get dressed and make their beds.

At 7:55 am, the bus driver (me) called out "All aboard the bus for school!!!" and the kids quickly got on board (lined up behind me) and the bus was off. The bus stopped for a pretend train (with noises) and then proceeded to school (our learning room).

Once in the learning room, then the headache from not having enough sleep started, Danny wanted his Batman, and Jack (our dog) wanted to play, on the other hand, Camille just wanted to start her lessons. Sigh. So at 8:10 am, Camille and I did her Explorer's Bible Study lesson and that went VERY well, unless you count the fact that Camille can not just put short answers, I've ingrained in her the need to answer in complete sentences so much that even though I told her she could just put the short answers, she still tried to write complete sentences. I'm not complaining...no siree - it just took her 20 minutes to finish something we could have done orally in 5-10 minutes.

To think about:
Will it be better to answer orally the questions in Bible?
Will answering orally take away from her absorbing the concept?

At this time, I decided to ignore the time schedule (8:00 Bible, 8:15 Math, etc.) in order to preserve some sanity! Danny and I did preschool in 20 minutes- letter A, letter A worksheet, reading How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World, coloring the world, talking about God, the world and daddies. I didn't expect that to go so fast!

Camille finished her math well while I read aloud to Danny in another room.

All of us sat and watched Mrs. Lee (Prima Latina DVD) through the introduction and first lesson. Tomorrow we'll do the exercises. After Latin, I put on Letter Factory by LeapFrog for Danny.

To think about:
Will it be possible to do Latin 2x a week with daily review and French 2x a week?
If we do this, will it be effective?
The time may change for Latin from 15 minutes to 30 minutes, possibly 2x a week with daily review of vocabulary.

While Danny was going over his alphabet sounds with Letter Factory, Camille did her Primary Language Lessons work. The phone rang and I spoke to another homeschool mom we're meeting next week for a social visit. I gave Camille a break after she completed her PLL lesson and then she worked on her first poem for the quarter, Bird Talk by Aileen Fisher. She read it aloud 3x and illustrated the poem for her poetry notebook. This was at 11:00 am.

French went well, we reviewed Unit 1 today and I had Camille write some French vocabulary, a spur of the moment type thing. Then we reviewed the American Revolution before reading Napoleon, The Little Corporal. Camille colored a picture, did some geography work and history was done for the day.

Building Critical Thinking Skills Book 1- Camille did 3 pages before telling me she was done and I told her she can do the book any time she wants but on Mondays, she has 1/2 hour to do as much as she wants/can.

We did not have lunch with a composer today, Camille did her piano practice, we're not doing craft time but the kids do want to do yoga today. I'm done, cooked with a fork. Now I have to do my chores. Danny has been running amok since 9:30 am when we finished his preschool stuff. I don't want to think about that....lol. It was a struggle but Camille is glad to have her lessons again, I'm glad too but I see room for improvement, mostly on my part.