Well, it’s that time of year again. The kids go back to school, the rain starts in, and it gets dark way too early. I do love fall though. Summer and Fall are my favorite seasons.

My oldest, Nboy, turns 7 in November and we started homeschooling first grade yesterday.  Sure we “homeschooled” Kindergarten, if you really want to call it “school”(it just gets me that people think you “have” to send your kids to Kindergarten, but that’s another topic for another day), but yesterday we started official schooling.

The nice thing, is that my mindset has changed. All year this year, I’ve been trying to get myself to get up at 7am and get the kids up at 8am. Wasn’t working. But now, I guess with the homeschooling being “official” I’ve got a motivation to get up and that’s what I’ve done the past 2 mornings. This is my plan for the school year, schedule wise:

• Up at 6:50 am-Study Bible and Prayer time
• 7:10 am-8am Eat breakfast, do morning routine(put clean dishes away, fold laundry,etc)
• Post on Twitter, blog, etc….
• 8am, get the boys up and eating breakfast
• 8:30 am Start school
• 11 am School done

So that’s a rough schedule for now, but it gives you an idea.

Yesterday we started at 8:30 on the dot and opened with prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Then we did some review in math and counting. Nboy can count easily to 100 and beyond, so we don’t need to work on that. Ekid, who will be 4 in December, can count to 10 pretty easily too. He’s not officially doing school, but I let him sit in and learn too.

So Nboy also did some addition problems and I had to remind him how to count on his fingers when adding larger numbers like 8+6, but other than that, he did pretty well on his own. I also wrote the numbers 1-9 in the front of his math section in his binder and drew the dots on them so he can learn to just count that way(that’s what they did when I was in grade school and it made it so easy), and then eventually do it in his head. We’ll be starting addition, and subtraction of double digit numbers pretty soon too.

Next we did Art. I bought big pieces of poster board, 4 of them, to stable 2 together for Nboy and Ekid and make them into big pockets for their artwork that they do throughout the year. They both got to paint one piece of poster board yesterday and will finish them today and then we’ll stable 3 sides together and they’ll just slip in their artwork. This is an idea I learned in my art class my Freshman year in high school.

By the way, Baby was still sleeping at this point, which was sooooo nice because he didn’t wake up till about 9:30 when we were done with the painting.

Now I think I’m going to switch it up today and do reading and writing before art, because yesterday Nboy was pretty tired after art and started getting easily frustrated with the reading and didn’t really want to do it.

So we started reading/writing time off with going over the alphabet and then I used alphabet flashcards and held each one up for Nboy to say what letter it was, then for Ekid to say it(he just copied his brother) and then held the same one up for Nboy to say the sound, and then Ekid to do the same. For reading we are working through the McGuffy’s readers, starting with the Primer. We were already a little more than halfway through it before summer started, so we just jumped in where we left off. He’s doing really well and only needed my help a few times, and even then I would just give him hints and he figured it out on his own.

So after reading, we had exercise time and I put on some kids christian music and we jumped, hopped, skipped to the music and had a fun time while getting a bit of a workout(at least for me anyway!)

That’s what we did our first day of homeschooling first grade.  I’m going to add Science and some History into our day somewhere as well, so stay tuned for more on our homeschooling journey!

Do you homeschool? What did you do for your first day back to “school”?