Our home school opened it's doors last week! Our pencils were
sharpened, our books labeled and sorted and we all were eager to get
started. I could see it in their eyes when we turned to page one early
on Monday morning. They were not sure what to expect either. But I
decided from the get go to keep lessons short and introduce a change of
pace on a regular basis.
Making Lemonade
By
late afternoon they flung their arms around my hips and looked up with
an expression that is hard to put into words, but I knew what it meant.
It was a sense of relief, happiness...... No. More like "This is going
to be great!" The girls actually ran hubby over when he came home to
show him
everything we did every day; talking over one another with an eagerness
verging on hysteria. Their excitement
is infectious.
Making Peach Cobbler
We've
made a family tree, we've studied American artwork, learned about,
played and listened to the violin, had an archeological dig in the back
yard, baked peach cobbler, went on nature walks drawing pictures of
everything we observe and dotting down observations in our science
journals and staring at out of space images on our microscope; modeled beeswax characters while reading beautiful stories
written by Hans Christian Anderson; swam every afternoon, traced shadows
on the driveway to learn about the passage of time and in between all of that we found pockets of minutes to practice
reading, writing and solving math problems when we are not dancing or
chasing colorful balloons around the great room! Phew!
Sunset On The Lake This Weekend
I've
already learned a lot. And I think the girls also realized
this is not going to be exactly like traditional school. We hardly ever
sit at a desk; there are no bells running our schedule and we progress
at the pace they are comfortable with (which is way faster than I
anticipated). We have a relaxed setup and I've already asked them to
let
me know what they want to learn more about, because I would love to
incorporate it into our little program. So, this week we will be
learning more about cheetahs!
Archeological Dig
