Starting School!

Since we're homeschooling this year and aren't technically tied to any kind of schedule or calendar, it was kind of hard to answer people who would ask, "So when is Emma starting school?"

We didn't really have an official start date. We'd already begun working on a few subjects late in the summer, and my plan was to slowly bring other things in as we went. But just to be able to give people an answer, and also to be able to give Emma a date to get excited about, I thought we would "officially" start school this past Monday.

We keep things pretty short and simple, though she'd be happy if we went on and on most of the day! She loves to read, and is getting better at writing every day. One of the books I started reading to her yesterday was the first of the Boxcar Children series. We read three chapters and she didn't want to stop. So when it was time for her to go upstairs to rest, she took the book with her. And this morning after breakfast, I found her hiding behind the curtains, laying on the window seat reading it again. I told her it's a good thing she's homeschooled, because I didn't think a regular classroom teacher would appreciate her sneaking off with the teacher's book like that. :)

Handwriting is one of the things we started working on a few weeks ago. She was quite unmotivated at first, but a little gum keeps her stuck to her seat and happily writing away! (I don't actually stick her to her seat with gum, but I do let her chew it while she is working. She thinks it's a real treat and she'll sit and work for as long as there's flavor left in the gum!) Usually for hand writing I give her a practice page she has to fill out, plus I write a sentence in her writing book, which she has to copy. Today the practice letter was k, and my copy sentence was "The cook took the cake." I had her work on it while I went upstairs to put Ashlyn down for her nap. When I came back down, Emma showed me her sentence: "The cook took the BRRTHDAY cake! and hid it and we cant Find it!" She noted that there was an extra "explimation" mark, because the people were yelling at each other. This is going to be a fun year!

Another project we launched today was our Traveling Addy geography project.


Traveling Addy is a girl we made up and sent on a world tour. We sent her to a friend in Australia, who will hopefully send her to another friend, who will send her to another friend... and so on. We created an e-mail account for the "host families" to send us letters about Addy's adventures as she journeys around the globe. We hope to get some interesting stories and learn a lot about different people and places throughout the school year.

Well, that's all to report from our first week of school. Emma is pretty excited about next week--we start math! She's been saying all summer how much she wants to learn math. That's my girl! :)