Today was the first day of schooooool!! K's day was great. She's happy to be back in the grind of things. I'm so excited for her, too. She seems to have a renewed confidence about herself and just wants to excel and be a part of it all.

After we dropped her off, B went to work and the younger 2 were eager to start their own work. I needed to make breakfast and clean up first. So J continued learning songs on the recorder with the self-teach book from the night before and W grabbed his Sight Words workbook and started on the next page - both on their own. Then I finally sat and started our schedule off with a readaloud. We picked The Witches (R. Dahl) and after a couple of chapters they each narrated back what they got from the story. W is really great at narrations. He remembers the tiniest details and puts in his own reasons why he thinks something happened. J likes me to throw questions at her about the story to show me what she remembers.

Then they went on to copywork. J copied a beautiful eagle poem from the Native American book we bought at the museum last month. She cracked open a brand new purple notebook and made it as neat as possible. W was doing the Sight Words book pages with me, but wanted to do "real copywork" like J. So I grabbed the Frog and Toad book and told him the first 2 sentences of the story would look great in his new green notebook. He copied it word for word with all the correct capitalization and punctuation. Then he read it to me while J was starting some Language Arts in the bridge workbook.

She did a section on fragmented sentences and one on finding which word was spelled incorrectly. Then both kids moved on to math. W did about 3 pages of review on telling time on the hour. J did a section of math from the bridge book. I love this book. It has just enough problems to get the point across without overkill. She wrote out numbers in the billions with words, did review problems on big number addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and a multi question graph problem. And she said, Why is math so fun? And I just smiled and wished I'd felt that way too.

We had geography on the schedule next, but J went back to the recorder for a while and W went to the computer for a couple of games. We then had lunch and decided to hold off on our schedule geography til next week. The homeschool group has a geography club meeting on Monday and both kids will do their own oral report on the Congo. J buddied up with her bff, A, and they're presenting on music. W will be doing his first presentation and his topic is native clothing. He doesn't seem nervous, but he knows I'll be right there if he needs a helping nudge or two.

It was a great relaxing first day back.