First Day of Homeschool!

We had our first day today! It went great. :) We started partway through breakfast with Bible reading, then sang a couple hymns and said a prayer.

Next, we did one section of Math Mammoth 1B, where we learned how to use the abacus, a funny way of naming numbers greater than 10 (1 ten 1, 2 ten 3, etc.), and learned how to count objects by grouping in 10s first. After that, he did a MEP 2A worksheet, which was easy, but he learned a little bit different way of doing less than and greater than symbols (MEP has you put a number in the symbol to show how much less than or greater than).

After math, we worked on CLE Reading 100 lesson 1. We talked about the schwa and Mama made many "May the schwa be with you." jokes, which really don't make sense to Tornado Boy, as he's never seen Space Balls (schwa/schwartz). He laughed anyway and enjoyed the lesson. It was a pretty quick lesson.

Next, we did Rod & Staff English 2, lesson 1. I decided since his writing is S-L-O-W, I would do it orally. I know a lot of people do this book orally in first or second grade, and it's fairly common to do first grade grammar orally. The writing will come later. This text is very easy to use orally or written, and it took us about 5 minutes to talk about how a sentence is a complete thought. He even remembered later in the van when I asked him what a sentence was. :)

At this point, we took a break and went to Walmart for groceries. This took about 30 minutes to get everyone ready. The Brute was having focus issues, as 4 year olds often do. :P Spent about an hour on our errands, came back home and did "recess" while Mama made lunch. Halfway through lunch, I read a chapter of Little House in the Big Woods.

Now it was time to put The Brute and Mischief down for their naps. The Brute has not had a nap in weeks and really, really, really needed one. What a difference it made too! While I was working on naps, I had Tornado Boy read a chapter from the book Tornado (ha!) by Betsy Byers. His instructions were to then read any book on the library book shelf until I came back down. He probably got about 20 minutes of indepedent reading in.

Once everyone was down for naps, I returned and we worked on our Handwriting Without Tears pages, learning the letter 'd' and copying two sentences involving the letters worked on so far. Note that Tornado Boy knows how to write all his letters. His problem is that he forms many of them "weird". I am correcting that. He did very well today. The "magic c" used in HWT has been really good for him, and he likes it. His handwriting is improving already.

After that, we did Writing With Ease. The copywork today was "There were no roads." I briefly went over how to form a proper 'e' on the back of the page, as that is one he forms weird. He did some beautiful 'e's today! I was impressed.

Finally, we had "ABS Bible", which is the curriculum he used at school. It's a story per week, and it is all in a workbook. He corrected me on the pronunciations of Ehud and Eglon. We'll see if I remember them the rest of the week. I'm not really up on my early judges, so this is good for me too!

We finished "school" by 1pm and played with Snap Circuits for the next 2 hours. That was FUN! I highly recommend them. Tornado Boy absolutely loved them and did 16 projects. He started getting pretty good at doing the projects on his own without my help. That's my little engineer!!!

Hopefully we'll have a good rest of the week. I'm sure the littles will try my patience a bit. We'll survive though. :)