1st day of homeschool...

Even though I've been educating my children since birth, I was very apprehensive about beginning 'formal' kindergarten for Christopher at home. I've taught 5th, 7th, 9th and 10th graders, but they all knew how to read, study and take notes. Teaching a child the 'basics' seemed more daunting to me than teaching about DNA transcription and translation. And yet, as I've been studying the various curricula for reading and math over the past few weeks, I've realized that we've been learning the basics with everyday life (i.e. we have 4 people coming over for dinner, how many people will be in our house? how many more chairs do we need?; do you see a letter "c" on the cereal box?; how many syllables does your name have?; and of course, don't forget about everything we're learning about dinosaurs...). Thankfully, I've become less anxious and overwhelmed as I've read through the books instead of more so. That said, the thing that overwhelmed me was having a schedule; a time to sit down and work on the specific rules and content of each subject rather than just teaching on the fly as the opportunity presents itself. And of course, the challenges of sticking to this schedule with 2, soon to be 3 preschoolers running around the house.

I am relieved to say that Day 1 of homeschooling has been fun and a lot easier than I anticipated so far! We began shortly after breakfast and a brief playtime with our Bible lesson and review of catechism questions. Sarah eagerly sat at the table and joined in while Hannah contentedly sat in the family room and flipped through board books. Then we moved on to reading/phonics. Since both kids know their letters and sounds, I started with the letter "Q" and how it is always followed by the letter "u" in words. When I asked which words begin with "qu", Sarah was the first to call out, "queen!" After we went through a few more, Christopher's face lit up and he said, "Quaternary!", as in the period when the woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers lived. After some more phonics and reading exercises, we ended the morning with a math lesson and are now listening to Beethoven as we play.

Christopher just yelled from the other room, "Is that all we're going to learn for today? I want to learn more, Mommy!" I'd better go...