First Day of School

Today was our first "official" day of school at St. Anne's Academy. I remember my mom always took pictures of us on our first day of school, especially when we headed off to kindergarten, and I didn't want to miss out on those memories with my own kids just because we are schooling at home.Brian - 5 years old

Sean - 3 years and 10 months old

Even Colin wanted to say "cheese"

Our school room was at the ready last night. I made sure everything was neat and tidy to set a mood and feeling for our school year. The white shelves and tables have manipulatives for Colin to work with while Brian, Sean and I are schooling. The large brown bookcase houses our language work. The computer (which is not hooked up to the Internet) is in the corner of the room. The table is good for Colin to color on (his paper, not the table!), and you can see Brian and Sean's desks on the right side - they were a gift from Gramma & Grampa for Christmas a couple of years ago. That large print between the windows is an actual poster from a bullfight in Spain back in 1947. My mom's high school Spanish teacher went to that bullfight, and gave my mom the poster. She had it mounted, and when I became a middle school Spanish teacher, she gave it to me. It now has a place of honor in our schoolroom.

This view of the schoolroom shows out other large bookcase. This one houses the CD player at the top (to keep small hands from playing with CDs!), our science/health work, math and religion. I really love having this loft as our schoolroom. With the 2 windows and the half wall, there is a lot of light that comes in this room and makes it really cheery. As an added bonus, there are 2 closets!

So what did we do today? Well, we started out the morning with a meltdown about 5 minutes into our day. There were tears, and a door was slammed hard enough to knock a picture off the wall. Oh yeah, and I was the one having the meltdown! I really need to pray a lot to remind myself that while Sean is so very smart, he is still not even 4 yet, and his attention span is not always going to align with what I'd like it to. Brian was so sweet though. He knocked on my bedroom door, and told me that he was going to have Sean come in and tell me he was sorry - and Sean did.

I sat down with Brian and Sean and told them that I want school to be fun, but that sometimes we just have to listen when Mommy is telling them about something. I asked them if they could work with me on this. They both agreed that they wanted to do school. So we headed back to the schoolroom with a spring in our step.

We started our morning with a Morning Prayer at our prayer table, and then I read them the Gospel from yesterday's Mass. We talked about keys and what they are for and made the inference that if you were in charge of the keys to heaven that that would be pretty amazing! I also prepped them for the fact that we are going to be reading each week about saints (discussed what saints are) and some special saints called Doctors of the Church.
After religion, we moved on to the Alphabet Path. We read all about Mrs. Applebee. I sensed Brian, and especially Sean, getting antsy, so I pulled out the modeling beeswax. I asked them to keep it in their hands the whole time I was telling the story. It actually worked! We listened to the story, and when the Apple Blossom Fairy introduces Michael to St. Anne, we paused and read about St. Anne in our Catholic Alphabet of Saints book. Then we formed the wax into letter "A"s. I had the boys color the Apple Blossom coloring page while we listened to the Apple Blossom Fairy song on the CD player.

At this point we took a break since the plumber arrived to fix the toilets, sink and dishwasher. I fixed lunch for everyone and afterwards went and put Colin down for his nap. I decided that since Sean was still running at a good pace that I wouldn't put him down for a nap. Instead Brian, Sean and I went back to the schoolroom (since they asked to do more school work) and I introduced the Gnomes. We talked about Roman Numerals 1-6. Sean dumped the whole basket of "gems" out on the floor, so instead of getting upset, I asked the boys to put the "gems" back in the basket by using different numbers - "put them back by two, now put four in at a time." It worked out really well.

We opened up our Explode the Code books and the boys took the 3 page consonant pre-test. They loved it! They wanted to do more and more work. I convinced them to only do the first page of short a sounds so we could save more work for tomorrow! And finally we talked about rain forests since that's what's in the Science Baskets for the month of August. I had the boys color a picture of a gorilla and then had printed out an Enchanted Learning book of animals of the rain forests. Now that Brian is getting into coloring he wants to color all the time. I'm letting him use his creativity when it comes to coloring - if he wants to add blue to a picture that doesn't have blue in it, go for it right now.

This afternoon we headed out to our church to sign Brian up for CCD, which starts tomorrow afternoon. I had to explain to Brian that he will be going by himself without Sean. He asked me why. I had to tell him that Sean is not old enough - what I didn't say is that it's that old arbitrary age issue rearing up.

Tonight while we were eating dinner, I asked the boys what their favorite part of the school day was. Brian told me it was coloring the tarantula. I asked him where tarantulas live and we learned the sign for rain forest. When I asked him if he thought the rain forest was wet or dry, he answered correctly. Sean's favorite part of the day was working with the gnomes. Both boys remembered a lot of the story of Mrs. Applebee.

We had a very good first day. I was surprised at how well it went once the meltdown was behind us. No one was whining to watch t.v., and everyone was peaceable and enjoying our "work". I pray that all of our days will go so well.