A Look At Our First Day of "School"

We always start our day with morning chores and devo. Today we prayed, read about Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac, went over memory verses and sang lovely songs.

Then it was math time. Elizabeth had calendar activities, Emily had the same plus time to the hour and Jacob had number patterning. Jordan reviewed numbers and Kimberly counted things for me.

This picture is out of order. It is Elizabeth doing language arts, and Jordan and Kimberly sitting in.

Here is Jordan working on numbers with Emily tutoring him.

At 9:50am we did some exercises together and then headed outside for PE. Today was walking and bike riding, but we also ended up playing next door with the neighbors' grandkids.

At 10:30 we cam inside to have Jacob and Emily read. jacob is reading Farmer Boy and Emily is reading Little House in the Big Woods. While they do this, I do language arts with Elizabeth (picture above).

After they read, Emily and Jacob do language arts and spelling or grammar, while the younger ones play, use computers or watch educational tv. Then they all do some writing. Jacob wrote a letter to the bowling alley, Emily practiced cursive and Elizabeth did some tracing. Then we were finished a little before noon so we ate lunch!

After lunch, the kids had free time to play. they diod alot of pretending and the girls played games together awhile. At 12:45 it was time for chores. Jordan took out some trash, Lizzie did dishes and folded towels, Emily and Jacob folded clothes and swept and wiped the table in the kitchen.

Here is Elizabeth doing a great job folding. After chores we read aloud from The Secret Garden, and I read a story to the little kids. Kimberly took a nap.

At 1:40 we started History. today we studied Vikings. The kids made campfire models (their choice) and drew pictures of Vikings. They also colored a map of Erik the Red's and Leif Ericsson's voyages to the new world.

Here is Jacob's cooking area model. this was not planned, by the way. I planned for them to narrate what we read. They wanted the project, so i said ok-it is a better learning experience that way!

Here is Emily's village area. Very cool work kiddos! After this we took a break and at 4pm we looked up the composer Gabrielli and artist georgia O'Keefe on the internet jsut for a bit of culture. Then we vegged on dvd's and snack food. Now it is almost supper time and it was a great first day! i will post other days in our life through the year. Not all homeschools are alike. in fact, most are vastly different. We don't all sit at the table and we have lots of breaks thru the day. As long as the work gets done we are happy.