Monday, August 6, 2012

First day back at (home)school

After many years of battles and case pleading, we've come to a milestone event--the first day of legal, your-kid-is-old-enough-for-state-oversight homeschooling.
Once the Things were presentable, we started with breakfast with our newest composer, Debussy.  "Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun" is a beautiful piece of music not to be missed.  After breakfast, we davened, with only the occasional interruption from Thing 1 about "we didn't say that in camp."  Amazing how I send my kids to an Orthodox Jewish camp, yet they daven more at home.  Then we went down to the classroom (actually, a basement playroom/guestroom with a blackboard, table and chairs, bookcases, and spaces for the Things to store their supplies.) 
Schedule:
Math: Thing 1 reviews number writing, while Thing 2 traces the number 1
Reading: Thing 1 reads a McGuffey's lesson (yes, my head is in another century), while Thing 2 works in a Kumon tracing book (and I find out that her motor skills are excellent)
Copywork for Thing 1.  Thing 2 gets acquainted with Handwriting Without Tears pieces
Thing 2 plays a file folder game while Thing 1 reads Hebrew and translates
Thing 1 learns to write the letter "resh" in script while Thing 2 and I review the letter "aleph"
Thing 1 finishes up with a dikduk exercise (matching prefixes to their meaning) while I read to Thing 2.
With Thing 2 finished, I then read to Thing 1.  Today, we read the first chapter of the Eskimo Twins.  Thing 1 is fascinated by the four-month-long days and nights above the Arctic Circle.  I show her Alaska on the globe, and give a demonstration of the reasons for said long days and nights.  Then, we read about the first governor of Boston, John Winthrop.  I enter his information on the timeline, and Thing 1 finds and labels Boston on a blank map of the eastern US.  We finish the morning with a start on our year-long project, a "Sefer Ha-Mitzvos" that I downloaded from chinuch.org.  This was just coloring in the cover and drawing a self-portrait, then pasting the pages into a notebook I bought for this purpose.  Believe it or not, this entire burst of educational activity took about ninety minutes.
After lunch, we went to the park for a park day meetup with other homeschool families.  The Things got to run around and "socialize."  Fringe benefit--so did Mommy!  When we got home, it was time for tea, poetry, art study, some singing, and Thing 1's piano practice. 
All in all, the kind of day that makes me want to keep my kids home until college.

1 comment:

  1. Yep, cuz everyone always claims kids can't be home schooled because they won't socialize. Like you said, school is not an 8 hour play date.

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