Back in the One-House School-Room

It was our first day back to school today. It was only okay. I think the kids enjoyed it for the most part. But they also seemed a little unsatisfied. I made it an easy day because I just can't see starting off with tons of bookwork and writing on the very first day. But I don't think it was enough for them. They were disapointed to be done just shortly after Noon (we started at 9 a.m.) And it was just plain stressful for me. I kept having one kid or another asking "now what..." while a baby was crying and a toddler was whining and my brain was spinning....ahhhhh...

This is what we accomplished today...
The day started off quite nicely with Circle time for the little kids. I made the big kids join in today -and only today- because it's the 1st day and our first story was about a family of 7 seven kids who learned that they need to work together to be a strong happy family- obviously I wanted all of them to hear that.
Next, we did our Morning Verse- something we used to do when the big kids were smaller and I decided to revive now that I have little ones in the schoolroom again. We stretch our bodies, signal our brains to transition from playtime to schooltime, and give love to the earth all at the same time. It's a lovely thing.

Then listened to our song for the week, a cool rendition of This Land is Your Land sung by Willie Nelson and bunch of other cool old folkies. After that, the biggest kid went on the computer to try out his new French program. And the girls and I read about the House that Jack Built and then went on to build our own houses. This is the house the 3 yr old built. I love that she wanted to add curtains...

After lunch and a quick visit from Grandpa, we did some History review with a cool video that did a nice recap of what we learned last year. Well, E and I thought it was cool. M thought it was boring and kept asking if it was almost over because "we already learned all this stuff last year (groan)" Yeah, that's why it's called review...but anyway.... then it was on to Math. The girls were very excited to look over all the groovy manipulatives that came with the new Math program I ordered. We had fun with those and got through the lessons while working to keep the smaller chokable toys out of BabyBird's mouth because he really wanted to taste every single one.

I was ready to call it a day by that point, but they were so not ready to wrap it up, so we went over the first Latin lesson of the year and looked through our new flashcards. I ran out of ideas after that and told them they'll just have to wait until tomorrow for more. Clean up and go outside already.

I think it's going to take us awhile to find our groove again, but I'm sure we'll be fine.