First Day of School!

I hadn't been planning on starting to officially homeschool Abby for a few years. The methodology I plan to follow recommends holding off on academics until they're 6 or 7, and using the years before that to build a child's interest in and understanding of the natural world--lots of nature walks, spending time observing plants and bugs, exploring the geology of your area, etc. But we see a big bus come every morning and pick kids up right outside our house, and Noggin (the little kid Nickelodeon channel on cable) has been talking a lot lately about school, so naturally Abby's been asking. So I figured, why not?

We started the day with a first day of school picture on the front step, of course!

Once upon a time Abby would give a great smile for pictures. Now, not so much.

After that we went grocery shopping, then when we came home and PJ was down for her nap we got out the base ten kit Abby had been eyeing in my office for weeks.

They're wooden units (ones), rods (tens), flats (hundreds) and cubes (thousands) that help teach place value and number sense. 

She loves these things. And there are a bunch of different ways to use them, so I keep changing it up so she doesn't get bored. She asks to "play" with them nearly every day now. We also started a number line--no picture of that yet, sorry--that will go up to 100. Right now we're in the 50's. For now it's just to help her learn to write numbers and count, but we're doing the odd numbers in green, the evens in red, then circling the numbers divisible by 5 in black and the numbers divisible by 10 in blue, so that eventually we can use it to learn how to skip count. ("Let's count by only saying the numbers circled in black! 5, 10, 15, 20...") I also have a gigantic post-it note pad, the kind you put on an easel for meetings, and have the Lord's Prayer, the first 2 verses of Genesis 1, and the first stanza of Psalm 23 written on them and posted on the wall of the loft. Abby likes to copy the words into her own notebooks, so we're killing a few birds with one stone there--scripture memory, spiritual development, and handwriting. :)

Then it was lunchtime, so Abby made egg salad with our Magic Bullet. (LOVE that thing!)

She really loves to cook with me now. She asks at every meal if she can help. We bought her a learning tower and it's been great--gets her up at just the right height, and no fear of falling off. 

After lunch we worked on Gigi's birthday present (can't tell you what it was since certain relatives will be receiving the same thing for their birthdays or Christmas), but with that we learned patterns, sequence, following directions, and worked on fine motor control.

Her favorite thing to do for the last couple days has been to work on writing her letters. I bought some kindergarten paper--with the pink top line and blue base line and dotted middle line--and wrote the alphabet on a page in Sharpie, then put it in a page protector. She writes on it with a dry erase marker. She has definitely improved her neatness and pen control, just in the last few days!

We also tended to our first experiment with gardening--a "see the roots!" kit we bought from, of all places, Bass Pro Outlet Store. (I also got a totally awesome outfit for the fall there--their clothing rocks!)

Now, the instructions never said anything about transplanting them, so we didn't, but I'm convinced they're smothered in their test tube homes and that this is why we have not gotten any actual vegetables. The greenery is different for each, at least, so we get some good comparison practice there. And the roots are indeed cool to look at. But I was hoping to be able to actually eat them eventually. Oh well. We'll just consider it a baby step to next year's Square Foot Garden.

Tomorrow we'll have "gym class"--Abby's first ever swim class, actually. It's a mom-and-me type deal, and sadly she is not excited, but I'm hoping once we're there she'll get into it. She's also signed up for her first dance class, but that doesn't start until October. My plan is to do one class a month at the rec center. There are SO many to choose from, and so many things that I wouldn't be able to do--a music class, Spanish, dancing, dancing, and more dancing. :)

So there you have it! Abby is officially in preschool! :)