First (in our actual home) homeschool day

January 9, 2009


Home sweet home. Today is our first home schooling day at our actual home. The hard part was that the place was in disarray – our suitcases still unpacked, the tree still up, and the detritus of Steve home alone for a week all around. I tried very hard to ignore the disorder and do schoolwork as usual, but we just weren’t well set up.

I managed to eek out a few bursts of cleaning and organizing while I set him on a task, but we still have a long way to go. It was a little harder to keep him focused – after all his home is filled with all the cool new toys he got for the holidays, even so I still feel like we had a really productive day – with lots of reading and math. We added at least six more words to his word box based on Bedtime for Francis. We also had a really neat discussion about the reason for fairy and folk tales that was paired with reading The Changeling – a kids folktale we picked up when we were in Wales a couple of years ago.

While were adding to his word box, Rocket Boy started to get really antsy and downright bouncy – jumping on the couch or spinning around in between reading almost every word. He was at a point where he needed to change activities but was also so excited about adding words to his collection that we just needed to barrel through the rest of the story (or at least that page of the story).

It was time for hopping math. We made lily pads with numbers on them and laid them on the floor. I then called out questions and he had to hop to the right answer and then hop that many times. “What number comes after 3?” “What number is before 2?” What is 2+2?” He got the wiggles out and got lots of math practice in. We both really liked this game and I think I see many more lily pads in my future.