First Day of School

Suzanne G asked how Monday went, as the first day of school! The answer is that we didn't actually start yesterday. We were visiting my mother in law's cabin by the lake over the weekend and didn't get home till noon Monday. So I figured it would make a good Not Back to School Day : ). We didn't do anything formal.

Today (August 11) we started off the day by going to a scenic place not too far from where we live -- McKinley Grove, a secluded haven for the spectacular giant sequoia. We took some pictures which we'll upload before too long, I hope.

I was ALMOST going to let another day slip by -- does anyone else get a kind of stage fright on that First Day? But we had an empty space in the afternoon after playing outside and I asked them if they wanted to get started on some school. And they did! (I love first graders -- they are so enthusiastic, and my 8th grader has maintained a positive attitude through the years, too). So we worked on a few of the things I had on my list. Notes here.

Kieron made cookies, another back to school tradition of ours. All in all, I think it went pretty well.

I have been making a lot of use of Google Calendar. I found out that you can attach google doc files to events. So I have "homeschool" noted as an event five days a week, but when I write a plan, or notes on how the day went, or make or find resources I want to use on a particular day, I can attach them to that day's homeschool session as a document. Then it's easy to quickly look ahead or look back at the files for that day. It's a bit like an electronic version of my central planning station. I was hoping that somehow I could make it public so that it could be easily read by others but I don't seem to be able to do that yet.

So the documents to pull up for Thursday (no school today because we have a jam-packed day of other things) will be the notes linked above plus a Caterpillar page for the little ones to put in their notebooks so they can work on memorizing the Rossetti poem and also draw or color a caterpillar if they want to.

I'm very happy with this capability!

If any of you blog a "First Day" (I know some readers are unschooly enough that you don't even do that) I would love to read it, if you link to it.