First Day

Okay, here goes. Today was the first day of school. After meeting the "weird homeschool mom" yesterday and with the surprise ant invasion this morning, I was seriously thinking "what the hell am I doing?! I don't want to do this!" but a little thought reminded me that there's really no going back at this point, after shelling out bucks for the cover school and the books and materials, not to mention that she's already missed more than a week of "real school". And I promised her last night that we would start today.

Of course it turns out that what she was most excited about was pretending to be cavemen. And so I had to gently prick that bubble with the fact that Daddy hasn't built the "cave" yet, and anyway it's TOO DAMN HOT to go outside and pretend it's the ice age. Hopefully in a couple of weeks things will cool down a bit, and maybe he can build it this weekend. Meantime, we can start reading about it and I promised we would in the next couple of days. But I wanted to do some geography first.

So here's what we did: I started off reading her the fable of the Lion and the Mouse, and had her narrate it back to me. (I explained narration first, so she'd know to pay attention) She did pretty okay, getting all the major plot points, though none of the nuances, and no moral. Not bad for a first try though. I think we'll do fables for at least the rest of this week and maybe next, then move up to a bit longer, maybe a few paragraphs of a book we're reading, or a short story. We'll see how she does.

Then we read Blast Off to Earth! by Loreen Leedy, (before I started, she asked nervously "Do I have to narrate this too?") and I got out the blank outline world map that Alan printed up for us and had her label the continents. She asked me where was Asia, and I had her look it up in the book. On her own, she got down the continents books and looked at the covers to see how to spell them correctly. We had a mini discussion about map distortion. (very mini). She was amazed by how big Asia is. I plan to have her pick a continent to study tomorrow. I printed up the "animals of various continents" pages I got here and I was going to cut them out and label them but then I thought she would familiarize herself with them if she cut them out and labeled them herself, so I stuck them in the folder to use later. It also occurred to me that nowish would be a good time to get out the animal cards I've been saving for so long. I might wait until she's had the habitats class at the zoo, and after I've introduced classification. I guess I better do that this semester, which means I'd better do it right away, since I'm doing earth/space science with the greeks and romans. Hmm. Maybe the radish seed experiment should wait till spring.

Then I was going to have her do math, but she was coughing and so I called the doctor's office. They were able to fit us in right away, so we took the math books with us. Of course in the lobby they had a movie on, "Happy Feet" which was predictably awful (why are the short penguins latino? They must be South American penguins, I guess...) but it did lead into a little discussion of predators (specifically the nasty demonic sea lion) and how they're really not demonic or vicious or full of malice, but just animals trying to survive like everyone else. We did the math pages in the examination room, which was the best use of that huge waste of time that I've come across yet. We did two lessons because they were so easy. She balked at her last page of workbook, more out of boredom, I think, but I insisted and it took her about 5 seconds to do it. I think she'll be more into it when it gets a little harder later on. Maybe I could have gotten 2A for her, but I didn't want her to miss out on the introduction to multiplication that's in 1B. So we'll just speed through until we get to something more challenging.

I don't feel like we got a full day's work done by any means, though I'm sure I could write it up to sound like we're geniuses, especially if I padded out those "mini-discussions". But I wasn't really planning to start until after Labor Day anyway, so I guess it's ok to start slowly and build our way up. But we do have a lot to cover this year, so I hope we can work out a good sort of rhythm soon. Also today she was very cooperative, but I fear what will happen when it gets a little old and she starts seriously balking.

Oh, I meant to mention what I did with Tuck. He sat and listened to the fable and the geography book, then while Emma did her labeling, I told him to get a puzzle. He brought his alphabet puzzle so I talked to him about A, B, C, and D, going over the sounds of B and D in particular, (since we had two Dogs and a Boy in the room at the time). Then I was going to help him do the puzzle while E did her math, but we ended up at the doctor's instead.