Homeschool Day 1

Today was our first official day of homeschooling.  I was very worried at how today would go and it didn't start off great with our puppy being up all night and then waking up with a headache.  But things improved.  The kids woke up at 7am and started getting ready.  We decided that an 8:30am start time was best.  The school they went to previously was 8am and we were late everyday and rushing around the house.  Being able to sleep that extra half-hour allowed them to wake up at a more reasonable pace and they got ready much quicker than usual.

At 8:15am both kids were sitting at the table ready to go, reading books and playing on their iPods.  At 8:30am I asked them to put their things away and we got started.  We talked about rules and what they are looking forward to in homeschooling.  We also discussed how it will work with a 4th grader and a 7th grader and how that can help both of them.  I described this as a "new adventure" for our family and asked them if adventures always go the way we plan.  They both said no and we talked about how we will work together when there are bumps in the road.

When we got started on lessons they took to them very quickly and it was easier for me to manage the two different grades than I expected.  I got Shana started on a reading assignment while working on an oral assignment with Hunter.  I asked Shana if working with Hunter would distract her and she said "No, it's so much quieter even with you two talking than it was in school."

Hunter started to get frustrated and upset when he had some writing work to do.  But when I explained it was only four questions and that was all he had to do for Language Arts he was shocked and quickly completed the work.  He also breezed through his math in a matter of minutes.  I be shortening the amount of math work per lesson and start doing multiple lessons per day to get him to more challenging work.

Shana had a spelling pretest and I decided to have Hunter try out the words too.  Shana is very understanding that they are each unique and have strong and weak areas.  Well, Hunter is strong in spelling and got 19/20 correct.  Shana is not good in spelling and got 3/20 correct.  Shana was fine because we quickly saw the pattern in her mistakes (i.e. bookkeeping/bookeeping, glowworm/gloworm) and she will easily do well on her spelling test next week.  She was very proud of Hunter and made him feel really good doing so well on 7th grade spelling words.

Today we did start with a very basic schedule of just math and language arts, we will be adding science next week and we will add history later in the year.  But we started their lessons at 8:30am and we finished by about 10:30.  We actually spent less time completing their work for the day then we typically spent doing homework each night at their old school.

I'm sure there will be many ups and downs on this adventure, but I know now more than ever that we have made the right decision and are doing the very best for our kids.