First Day of School

Tomorrow is our first "official" day of homeschooling our daughter, L.  We have "done school", as she likes to say, since she was 2, but now we are reporting and submitting paperwork, so it feels completely different. This year we are starting 1st grade.  Here's a glimpse of what our year will look like:

Reading: All About Reading Level 1
Writing and Typing: Typing Without Tears and Handwriting Without Tears K and 1 (L's handwriting could use some improvement, so we are starting back at the beginning)
Language Arts: First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind Level 1
History: History Odyssey - Ancients 1
Science: Noeo Science - Biology 1
Math: Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool - Math 1
Music: Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool - Ancient Music
Art:  Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool - Ancient Art
P.E. and Health:  Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool - P.E. / Health Odds

Go With the Flow

We had an unofficial first day of school today, when L decided that she was in the mood for school.  I use times such as these to catch up if needed, or to dig deep into a topic, because I know I'm going to have a solid 3 hours of enthusiastic participation.

I decided to start with history, because I've been super excited about what we're doing, and because I knew we could start off with some fun, hands-on stuff and set a happy tone for the day.

We are doing History Odyssey - Ancients 1 this year, because I have discovered that I have some leanings towards the Classical style of schooling, including covering history in chronological order.  Our curriculum uses an Evans-Moore History Pockets book, and a few days ago I had created the physical book of pockets, which are made out of construction paper,so we were able to start with the content.  At 5.5, L loves craft projects, but too much of any one thing tends to wear out her positive attitude.  If I had let her construct the book of pockets, that's all we would have accomplished that day.

I started out by giving L the cover page to color, cut out, and glue to the front cover of her book.  I also gave her the information booklet that went along with the first pocket, entitled "What is History?", with instructions to simply color it.  While her hands were busy, I read the assigned passage from Susan Wise Bauer's book The Story of the World Part 1.

The front cover.

The "What is History?" pocket containing our projects.

Information booklet.

Next, we completed a vocabulary exercise.  I showed her that the words we needed to define were in the text of her booklet.  She colored the images associated with each word, cut out the words and the images, and then matched the image back to the vocabulary words before pasting them onto the worksheet.  To make it easier for her to copy, I wrote the definitions on a whiteboard and pointed at each word as she copied it down.  Civilization has a long definition, so I wrote it out for her, instead of forcing her to do it.  It's little things like this that can help keep things moving in the right direction, instead of ending in a panic-induced meltdown of no return.

Vocabulary worksheet.

Finally, we looked at a map of the world marked with the areas we intended to study, and then L colored and glued together a simple timeline.  At this point, we had spent a productive 3 hours talking about ancient civilizations and creating our history pocket, and L was ready to play for the rest of her Saturday

World map that we will be referencing throughout the course.