Our First Week of School

We have now completed our very first week of homeschool! It has been wonderful too!! The kids were excited every day to see what we would learn and so was I!!

This is the girls working on their English or Language Arts, or ILA, or whatever you want to call it. Each one of their books was selected based on their own unique interests. I guess I knew that I had done that but I didn't realize how awesome and exciting it was going to be when the girls started getting into them.

For example, Oreo Cookie has been on the newspaper crew at her school for a couple of years now... she LOVED it! The curriculum I purchased for her is Wordsmith Apprentice and in it she is a newspaper reporter writing for the paper! PERFECT! Chocolate Chip really loved going to public school and I think she was excited to find that in homeschool she gets to do the same type of worksheets that she loved doing there. Butterscotch Chip is truly a model student for her new classmates! She is working in her new Jump In by Apologia book and she loves it because it is asking her for HER interests and HER opinions and she is using her own imagination to help her write better! Over the past month or so, she has been writing some pretty awesome stories - all self-directed and on her own. In fact, she has written a book. She wants to look into publishing it, so, you will be hearing lots more about that!

Mini Chip has been a very good student also! He has been practicing that fantastic smile of his and is receiving some crawling lessons from his big sister too! LOL! Don't you just wish you could crawl inside their amazing brains and see what's going on in there during moments like this! He has also been practicing his giggle, which is AMAZING and makes everyone giggle!!

The kids insisted that we get a picture of their "new school teacher"... they are so fun!

In this picture we are remembering our trip down to Arizona from Minnesota and what states we traveled through to get here. We also talked about what each state is known for and how hard and long the trip would be to travel on a bicycle or on foot or in a covered wagon. Thank God for Mom's comfy mini van!!

This is a picture of the menu I created for lunches. It is similar to the public schools menu with an added "Chef for the Day" so that each day of school, one of the kids is making lunch at their own ability level, without help. This includes the serving and the cleanup portion of lunch as well. The menu is for 5 weeks, we will then start the menu over so I will not have to create another. It is awesome and we love being prepared and organized for the day. Announcing the Chef of the Day and the menu is part of our morning routine along with the date, day of the week, flag, schedule, etc.

This was Chocolate Chips day. She wanted to have lunch served in a self-serve line similar to public school. She served pizza rolls, veggie sticks and dip, and cantaloupe. She was so happy!

Mini Chip tried on Butterscotch Chip's glasses, TOO CUTE!!

This is a lapbook we did on the Dr. Suess book "Are You My Mother?". Chocolate Chip read the book out loud to all of us and then we talked about the different parts of the book and what we could learn from them. We got the idea and all of the print outs for this project from http://www.homeschoolshare.com/

Each one of the girls had their picture taken, their height and weight measured, along with their signatures and some other things entered into a sheet for the beginning of the school year. We will do this again at the end of the school year. They filled out a question sheet that I had made too. It has questions like what is your favorite color, movie, book, etc. and questions like: if you could go anywhere where would you go... stuff like that. They also took some time at the end of the day to journal about the first day of school. We will put these things in a 3-ring binder we will be using for notebooking our experiences this school year. In the end it should serve not only to remember memories but also to enhance our learning.
Love to you all! {{hugs}}