First Day of Homeschool 2020/2021

Well, the big day has finally arrived!! Homeschool 2020/2021

SO much thought, prayer, planning, and research has gone into this. I woke up at 6am, a little nervous and a little excited. I took one last picture of our beautiful school room before it was destroyed.

I wanted to have a chance to get some things done before school dominated our morning. (School begins at 9am sharp here). Things like making Adam's breakfast and saying goodbye, laundry, dishes, getting myself ready, making beds, breakfast, watering plants, baking, and definitely getting some Bible time in. I needed to fill myself up with encouragement for the day.

I'm realizing Andrew will need his own "preschool" area. He makes SUCH a mess, and I know this will only frustrate the older kids. I am looking in to getting him a little desk or table for this corner.

In the meantime, I've bought him some fun things to distract him....like window markers!

Jenna and Lucas both woke up excited for the first day of school! Lucas bounded out of his room all dressed, and told me he had made his bed and cleaned his room. I caught this sweet moment of him brushing his sister's hair to get her ready for school pictures.

Andrew was a little confused. He kept talking about going to his "flower school", which is the 3's class at church. We keep reminding him that we can't go there right now, so preschool is at home. I absolutely can't believe he is a few months older than his brothers when they began preschool. He seems so.......NOT ready. Ha!

Jenna was super excited to begin Kindergarten!

Lucas was ready to rock 3rd grade!

And Ryan was.....okay. School just isn't his favorite. Not even close. But he put on a smile and seemed okay.

The kids had the brilliant idea of pulling in one of our end tables for Andrew. Voila....his preschool corner! We gave him some toys, paper, crayons and kid scissors. And hoped for the best.

We began our morning with a little devotional, and then got out our language arts books. Here is how I did it. I began with Ryan, and gave him my full attention for Language Arts. Meanwhile, Lucas and Jenna worked in their handwriting books independently. Then I switched to Language Arts with Lucas, and Ryan and Jenna did handwriting. Finally, I did phonics with Jenna and the big boys did handwriting. Once our typing program arrives I will alternate handwriting with typing, since both can be done without my help.

We took a break for some homemade banana bread and sunshine.

After our break we started in on Math. To be honest, it wasn't great. Jenna's was fine....basic counting and learning numbers. Lucas got frustrated but ended up doing fine. He got through half a lesson. Ryan gave up about 1 minute in. With him, I chose to give him an evaluation to make sure he was ready for Level 5 Horizons Math. He didn't understand the very first question, and that spiralled him down into a big funk. I got him through about half the assessment, but he made it very clear it was dumb, terrible, awful, useless, stupid, etc. I'm thinking we'll begin with the Level 4 review tomorrow and see how that goes. I'm a little confused because Math has always been Ryan's strongest subject. But, everything about this is totally new. So we'll take things slow. Meanwhile, things at Andrew's desk started getting really messy.

I let all the kids play with play-doh while I got ready for science. We will be alternating between science and history every day. Today we began with Marine Biology Lesson 1.

We learned about the oceans and currents, and did a fun little experiment with blue ice cubes. Lucas and Jenna were super into it, and proudly worked on their science binder assignments. Ryan.....not so much. By this point Andrew had somehow found paint and started painting his playdoh. He made an enormous mess, and I'm thinking he needs a tarp under his little desk!

By this time it was noon. I fixed lunch and we settled down for some reading. Most days I will have the boys do independent reading. Today, I had them pick out their first books and they will begin them tomorrow. I chose to continue with our current read-aloud so that they could eat and just relax and listen. We are reading this fun book. By 12:45 we were done with our first homeschool day.

And now I'm letting them watch some TV.....because honestly, it's a million degrees outside and there's nothing else to do. I need to figure out what our afternoons will look like. I don't want to just let them sit in front of screens, but without any sort of extracurricular activities, our options are limited. What do your kids do in the afternoon after homeschool or distance learning?