First day homeschooling!

Well, we did it! Yesterday was our first day homeschooling! Woohoo! Even though it was Labor Day we didn't have a lot going on and since we only have 3 weekdays/week at home right now I thought we'd get going. Also, I confess, I was too excited to wait any longer! After lots of looking around for the "right" program for our family, I settled on Five in a Row, a fantastic program of what is basically unit studies based on children's literature. My plan is to cover each book for 2 weeks at a time (so we get in 6 good days of schooling), so we'll be going through all of the FIAR Volume 1 books this school year.

We're starting with the book A Pair of Red Clogs which is about a little girl in Japan. We started the morning by reading the book and talking about what we noticed about Mako's life - clothing, her town, her home, etc. Nicole loved the book and made lots of great observations, including how they ate dinner sitting at a short table on pillows. We talked about the fact that people in different parts of the world have different customs, different writing styles (thanks to the signs in Japanese in Mako's town), etc. Nicole has a Madeline doll dressed in a kimono, obi and geta, so we took her out and talked about those clothes and she noticed that "even the boys" in the story wore them.

She also mentioned that they were eating fish for dinner, which segued nicely into geography as I asked her if she knew why people in Japan eat lots of fish. We found Japan on the world map hung up in the office and talked about islands. She said "hey, just like Hawaii is in the middle of the water!" (we went there last year and she knows where it is on the map.) Then she colored a map of Japan and the Japanese flag and we tacked them up on the bulletin board in the office so we can look at them throughout the unit until we finish next week by notebooking the fruits of our labor! Lastly, we did the vocabulary words for the story and made a vocab mini-book. She loves to cut and paste so this was great fun for her. We tacked that up on the bulletin board too.

Then Daddy came back from golfing and she couldn't wait to show him all the stuff we did! We called it the end of a great (short) first day homeschooling and headed out to lunch and to do some baby shopping as a family. The only disappointment for Nicole is that we didn't get to do math or reading because she has a new lined dry-erase board I told her we'll use this week to practice numbers on and a new Explode the Code workbook for reading and she can't wait to use either! Suffice to say, we'll have lots to do on Wednesday!

P.S. Can you tell I already love homeschooling?!