Our first day of school was Wednesday August 24th 2011. For better or worse, I decided to start off by sharing the same calendar as the local school district. It’s what one of my exemplar homeschooling families does, and it makes scheduling easier, especially when you’re dealing with families in the public school system. I decided to just go with what my pretty calendar says will be happening on Wednesdays, which meant P.E. first!
That worked out well, because my other exemplar homeschooler, my SIL Cindy, suggested having a “NOT Back to School” celebration. Said celebration, “school” photos, and P.E. could all be nicely taken care of by going to a park, so that’s what we did. Not our neighborhood park that butts right up against our elementary school, because AWKWARD, but one that the boys decided on, over in a different neighborhood.
Photos first!
That worked out well, because my other exemplar homeschooler, my SIL Cindy, suggested having a “NOT Back to School” celebration. Said celebration, “school” photos, and P.E. could all be nicely taken care of by going to a park, so that’s what we did. Not our neighborhood park that butts right up against our elementary school, because AWKWARD, but one that the boys decided on, over in a different neighborhood.
Photos first!
Then we practiced catching and throwing with a volleyball. Our first P.E. unit is actually baseball (by popular demand), but I thought I’d start us off easy. Sports are not traditionally our family’s strong suit (we're NERDS). Then the boys just played for a good 15 minutes or so. I uploaded photos to Facebook while swinging, which I still love to do. They ran around and got sweaty and worked up their hearts and burned calories and they loved every second of it. Can I just tell you how much they have HATED regular P.E. at school? Pretty much without fail, it is their most hated subject. But now we can all get exercise and learn sports and LOVE it. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me!
Then we headed home for math time. Spectrum workbooks, if you’ll recall. We can already tell Ben’s way WAY beyond the usual 6th grade standards, so we’ll have him just skip and jump through the current workbook as a review and move him along as fast as he wants. We got his STAR test results back a couple weeks ago. In math and science he got perfect scores. That’s where he shines.
Side note: Ben’s science GRADE did not shine at school last year. Ben is pretty solidly a left-brain kid; all analysis and number crunching. So when his science teacher put most of the grade weight on the kids’ science JOURNALS and how pretty they were, he almost frigging failed that subject. I think he ended up with a D on his report card. And then he aced the state-required standardized testing. Another point in homeschooling’s favor: no required and enforced homogenizing. I will help Ben improve his writing, but I will never require him to be as good at it as he is at math. It will never be his joy nor his strength, and public education hates that. /rant
FIRST DAY GOOF (yeah, I told you this blog would be warts and all): So here's the deal with my 9YO Josh. He's bright, every bit as bright as Ben, but is SO very right-brain. All creativity and stories and "Want to hear about the movie I'm going to make when I grow up?" So Joshua's language and reading grades have always been high. His math grades have always lagged a bit behind, but it's NOT because he's no good with math. He can totally do it, he just HATES to. It's horrible horrible grunt work for him, with no room for creativity, and that drive him nuts. He's a very active kid, too, so sitting still (yuck) PLUS crunching numbers (yuck) while his brain is trying to tell him a story equals DOUBLE YUCK.
So I was okay with the fact that his math workbook was the ONE book stuck on back order, because I thought it would be a great opportunity to do math in a fun way for him. His 3rd grade teacher, bless her heart, recognized his talents and limits and suggested I have him keep a ledger of some sort to give math more real-life relevance. I was all over that back when I was planning on starting us off with a Spy Unit ("and I'll have a store with spy gadgets and Josh will be in charge of shopping and then he'll have to figure out if 3 bottles of Invisible Spray at $12 a bottle is a better deal than blah blah blah" and that's why we're not doing a Spy Unit. Yet. Too much work for a n00b).
Then there I was on the first day of school with nothing brilliantly creative planned for Josh. "But!" I thought, "but I have little individual white boards! We can drill multiplication facts on his whiteboard because kids love writing on whiteboards and that will be fun!"
It wasn't. Although now I know several kickin' hairstyles for the number 7.
FIRST DAY GOOF (yeah, I told you this blog would be warts and all): So here's the deal with my 9YO Josh. He's bright, every bit as bright as Ben, but is SO very right-brain. All creativity and stories and "Want to hear about the movie I'm going to make when I grow up?" So Joshua's language and reading grades have always been high. His math grades have always lagged a bit behind, but it's NOT because he's no good with math. He can totally do it, he just HATES to. It's horrible horrible grunt work for him, with no room for creativity, and that drive him nuts. He's a very active kid, too, so sitting still (yuck) PLUS crunching numbers (yuck) while his brain is trying to tell him a story equals DOUBLE YUCK.
So I was okay with the fact that his math workbook was the ONE book stuck on back order, because I thought it would be a great opportunity to do math in a fun way for him. His 3rd grade teacher, bless her heart, recognized his talents and limits and suggested I have him keep a ledger of some sort to give math more real-life relevance. I was all over that back when I was planning on starting us off with a Spy Unit ("and I'll have a store with spy gadgets and Josh will be in charge of shopping and then he'll have to figure out if 3 bottles of Invisible Spray at $12 a bottle is a better deal than blah blah blah" and that's why we're not doing a Spy Unit. Yet. Too much work for a n00b).
Then there I was on the first day of school with nothing brilliantly creative planned for Josh. "But!" I thought, "but I have little individual white boards! We can drill multiplication facts on his whiteboard because kids love writing on whiteboards and that will be fun!"
It wasn't. Although now I know several kickin' hairstyles for the number 7.
Then Church History (a brief overview of the time between Jesus’ life on earth and Joseph Smith’s first vision, with stops at Martin Luther and the establishment of religious freedom in America). That was fun. Oh, hey, if you don't know me and just stumbled on my blog somehow, my family is LDS.
Then lunch. And more running around outside for “lunch recess”. Guess how many times that happened voluntarily during the summer? Like, zero. Kids are so weird.
Then the last subject of the day was Spanish, and that was hysterically fun. We just looked up nouns in our little English/Spanish dictionary (and online), and labeled things in the house. Including the dogs. And our butts.
And that was our first day of school. The boys had a blast, and I had a blast, and it was all very encouraging. And I'm looking up some fun math websites for Josh till either his workbook comes or I can get my butt in gear and come up with some stuff of my own for him.
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