Our first day back to Homeschool.

Listening to stories at breakfast time

   Today was our first day back. The days started off early for me because I had to get all the logistic things out of the way. I had to make sure that all the subjects were divided into the right days, the copywork quotes were in the right folders, that I had printed enough weekly schedule sheets, etc. The rain was really coming down outside our windows and the day seemed so gloomy. I was thinking of all the kids who had to walk to school in these flood waters. This was one of the mornings that I was really glad that we could do all our work inside.

My homeschool bench

Storage boxes

   I organize my day's work into seven 12x12 plastic storage boxes from Michael s. I got them last year on sale for 4.99 each and they keep our days organized. For Christmas last year, my dear husband build me a wonderful pine bench to hold all the school supplies. So now all the work (except books for reading) goes there. We have one box for every day of the week, plus one for individual work (like math and copywork) and one for everyday family work. I also have couple extra boxes for art supplies and extra school supplies.

The boxes are organized into days of the week

Spanish work

   Monkeys woke up while I was still getting everything organized so I got them to help out a bit before they got their morning chores done. We then sat down and had a nice breakfast. The nice thing about homeschooling is that you can start doing your work while eating breakfast. I started by reading our everyday teachable story to them from 100 Classic Stories. Today's story was  "the Brave Tin Solder". I remember that story from when I was a child and I always really liked it. We then learned a new poem for this week from Great Poems book that I bought in Chapters a while back. Since it's a shorter week and we're just getting into the grove of things I picked "Red Sky at Night" traditional verse. It's easy to memorize and we had a good talk over the color of the sky and what it meant to shepherds and sailors.

Monkeys doing work

   After breakfast we tackled Spanish. This year we are trying out Spanish Now! Level 1, so we did the introduction and I got Funky Monkey and Girly Monkey to copy our vocabulary words. We then talked about them and then I had Monkeys repeat them after me. This is going to be our vocabulary for this week to learn. Funky Monkey had no problem with copying the Spanish vocabulary but Girly Monkey complained a bit about her arm being sore from all the writing. I explained to her about her muscles getting stronger the more she got to exercise them. She looked a little dubious at my explanation. Maybe she was hoping that I would excuse her from writing it. .

Girly Monkey's
copywork

Funky Monkey's
copywork

   Funky Monkey was most excited about starting his math. He has looked at the first page few days ago and wanted to do it ever since then. Girly Monkey thought that her first math page was very easy too so I didn't get any complaints from her either. The same couldn't be said about her copywork. While Funky Monkey finished his copywork quickly and well, Girly Monkey took a very long time to finish it. Overall, both of them did a very thorough job copying their quotes, so they got stickers on their pages. Yes, we do stickers as motivation. Monkeys really like the stickers and it helps them focus on their work so they can receive their reward.

   Since today was History day we read an introduction to Renaissance (our time period for this semester) from Renaissance Fashions and then I copied one picture from the book for each Monkey to color.They had to keep in mind the colors of the time period and try to be accurate. Overall, it was a shorter day than our regular days will be, but it was nice to start off slowly and ease into it.

   Whether you homeschool, send your kids to school, or do Distance Learning, I hope that everyone's first day back was amazing with lots of fun!