1st Week of School! part 1

Well the 1st week of school is finally over!  I must say that it flew by so quickly that I couldn't believe that today was Friday!  Never have I ended a week of school still feeling full of energy!

1st Surprising moment: My house was so quiet I could have heard a pin drop.

Seriously, there were entire hours every morning when all 3 of my kids were working in complete silence at the same time.  It was a first at our house and it was beautiful!

Here are our 1st day of school pics:

"I'm in 3rd grade but I want to be a zookeeper!"

"I'm in 1st grade but I want to be a cop or engineer."

"I'm 3 but I want to be a sister!"

So let me give you a recap of our week subject by subject.

Memory Work  

Each day we work on memorization.  All the kids currently have the same memory verse and I am hoping it will stay this way all year.  This week was 1 Timothy 4:12.  We used the song and video found on youtube by Seeds Family Worship to memorize it. 

 I have absolutely fallen in love with these songs!  They are catchy and stick in your head all day.  I hear Samantha and Matthew singing the songs throughout their day as they play-and Kaitlyn had it memorized the very 1st day.

             

I ordered these cds and I plan on mostly using them the rest of the year.  I have never been so excited about memorizing scripture!  To order your own cds go to http://www.seedsfamilyworship.com/our-music/

In addition the kids are working on memorizing the books of the bible.  Kaitlyn already has 75% of the books memorized, Matthew knows 15% so we are hoping to move through this fairly quickly.  Kaitlyn is just reading a list to memorize(her preference), Matthew and Samantha however are using  the Bible Book Bop by the GoFish Guys.

2nd Surprising Moment: Kaitlyn has an amazing memory!

Not only did she memorize the memory verse the very first day,  but she has already memorized all of our 3-part art cards after it was only 1 presentation! What impressed me the most was on Thursday when she told me she had already memorized her poem-the 3 stanza poem I assigned Tuesday morning!  I mean seriously I was planning on that taking a few weeks-who does that?

Samantha Time-The Letter A

We always start of with calendar before we move onto her activities.This week Samantha time was focused on the letter A.  Matthew mostly participates in this with her since he thinks its fun and it can't hurt to go over the letter's again in 1st grade.  Often times we got so busy playing that I forgot to take pictures of our activities.  Here is what I did remember to capture:

 

Talked about the sound of the letter a and traced it with our fingers, the dry erase marker, and then covered it with play-dough.

Worked on a letter A lacing card that you can find here.

Practiced spelling her name using a laminated Samantha puzzle.

The tray has colored stickers placed on it.They used alligator
 tweezers to to sort the colored cotton ball to match the stickers.

 We painted these letter A's from http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.com/ . We used Q-tips dipped in red paint to fill in each small circle-this was a big hit!

Alphabet hunt was so much fun.  Who wouldn't love digging through a pile of beans to find matches to the board.  Then later we would pick a clue and the kids would find the picture that matched the clue!  These printables can be found  here.

We counted and pushed buttons into bits of playdough and then matched number cards 1-5 taken from our Right Start Math curriculum.  She really enjoyed this.

All these activities were stored in her drawers so that when I was busy working with the other children she could get them out and work on them and then put them away when she was done.  For the most part I was pleasantly surprised to see that she cleaned up very well between each activity.  Here is how Samantha's drawers looked this week:

Notice the empty container-1st item not put away.  The
 pieces to the Short Vowel Shuffle Game.
Hopefully it will turn up this weekend.

3rd Surprising moment: Samantha is extremely self motivated!

She would work for 30 min with me in the morning and then spend the next 1-2 hours doing the school activities herself without any prompting from me.  She loves school and cries everyday at 2 when her school ends and she has to take a nap.

Come back later to find out what we did this week in History, Art, Music, and Math!

And School Starts tomorrow!

I can't believe its already here!

So I had this great idea that I would spend the summer having fun with my family and friends and not start the whole school planning thing until August.  Because last year I had the opposite idea plan first, have fun later.  And of course I planned all summer!

Not this year though!  I had the best summer ever!

And now I'm completely ready to start school tomorrow!  Over the summer I deep cleaned and organized the house so the school year would be less hectic.  Jon put up shelves in the kids bedrooms so that their projects would have a place to be displayed and valued other than the kitchen counter.  I have bought all the school supplies, all the curriculum, and laid out a very well planned day. Everything is copied, my bulletin board looks great, I have great learning incentives planned, and I have all those fun back to school celebrations planned that I pinned on pinterest!  All we need now is a good night's sleep and a well balanced breakfast packed full of protein!

Not!

Not only is my bulletin board not finished, I'm still cutting and laminating!

  The kid's school supplies have been bought but they are all in a bin in the basement(don't even ask me if I have presharpened the pencils).

 I do have this really cool incentive plan-in to motivate the kids in their school and housework but its sitting on my pinterest board.

 I did get a lot of cleaning and organizing done this summer-however it is far from finished.  And those shelves-well I have the wood stacked neatly in my basement. Please don't even look at my laundry table.

Instead of being full of energy going into the 1st day I have a cold-I have to blow my nose every 5 min and sit down to rest every 15!

  Here is a picture of our school schedule for the week I printed 3 days ago:

See all that stuff written in ink all over the margins.  Yep, my pretty looking schedule is already full of corrections.

The perfect 1st day of school is not going to happen here tomorrow.  I wanted it to be perfect. I thought it would be perfect.  And up until this morning I was convinced that everything had to be perfect or I was not valuing my kids education and upbringing enough.

But I was wrong.  I was wrong because WE LIVE HERE.  We don't live on a pinterest.  I spent the summer making memories with my kids.  I played my little ponies for an hour today when I knew I was still trying to plan the perfect 1st day of school. What's more my family will continue to live here for the remainder of the school year-and it will never be perfect.

It's because we live here.

And because I'm terrible at organizing!

And school starts tomorrow so I'm going to give you a quick tour of our school room:

 

This is my kitchen/school room.  We do most of our school work sitting in here. I'm excited to have 2 white boards this year instead of just 1!  Notice the calendar in the middle still doesn't have numbers-that will have to be fixed by tomorrow.  The envelope on the right contains our music cards and I will probably add our memory verse to the empty spot on the board at some point.  Right now it is written on the white board.

This is the cabinet in the kitchen that contains almost all teacher's guides, workbooks, school supplies, etc.  that we use on a regular basis.

Here is the newest addition to the kitchen-Samantha's preschool stuff!  I am super excited that Samantha now has her own space instead of being crammed into the cabinet!  I am hoping this will help her be more independent with her work.

Our newest bookshelf in the living room!  I just bought this and I am still working on filling it up and organizing it.  On one shelf I have all of our history texts for Ancient Egypt.  Another shelf full of library books to complement what we are studying each week.  I have another shelf with reference type books-dictionaries, children's encyclopedias, and books I'm reading.

This is our Math area.  It's in my bedroom.

Math in the bedroom-its so romantic!(Insert bad math jokes here)

 We started doing math upstairs in my bedroom last year because the girl's were taking naps downstairs and this guaranteed them some quiet.  Samantha still takes naps so we will still be doing math upstairs in my bedroom.

Kaitlyn also does take school work to her room to work on independently.  She normally does this because Matthew likes to make noises when he works and she can't stand it.  I can relate to her so I allow it as long as she gets her work done.

The school room tour is finished so I guess there is no delaying finishing up all these loose ends.

And school starts tomorrow!