First Day

Just carry me upstairs right now.  We started school today and overall it was a good day.  But starting new curriculum, adjusting to Mini’s new schedule, and trying to make the first day fun and exciting meant it was a looong and tiring day.

And it’s summer for pity’s sake.  Who’s idea was this again?

Yeah, I know.  It was mine.  But I have good reasons for starting early.  I like the gradual approach with Max and I like the occasional Let’s-Ditch-School-Today approach with Max, and I like the Entire-Month-of-December-off approach with Max, too.

So, in order to get to do all that, I figured it is best to start in July.  And here we are.

We did have a good start and there were no complaints. Max was very excited to be called a First Grader and we did a memorable thing to get things started. We had a Clue Hunt, his most favorite thing in the world.

These are the clues he had to find around the house which told him some of the things he’ll be learning about in 1st Grade.  I limited the clues to 7 of them in case he got bored of the game.  Also, I got lazy.  It’s hard work to think of clues that aren’t too easy but he can still read some of the words.  One of the last clues was “I am a book.  God is the author.  What am I?”  He was like, “okay.  That was boring.  Next please.”

But one of the clues was super cool.  It was about quicksand and I had bought this neat little make-your-own-quicksand science kit at the curriculum fair that he has been asking us to do.  I told him that today was the day for it and he was stoked.

More on quicksand later.

Max loved the Clue Hunt and all the fanfare and said things like “what’s in this bad baby?” when he’d open a new envelope.  A chocolate donut with sprinkles gave him a little extra pep in his step.

After we read all the clues he got dressed and I tried to direct Mini toward various toys.  All she was interested in was what Max was doing, though.  Here we go…

A couple of major Mini-interruptions and two hours later we were done with our four subjects (we’ll usually do five but we skipped math today).  Still, this is longer than we spent in kindergarten and I wonder how he’ll do.  We bounced around from the kitchen to the living room to outside on the deck so that helps.

We ended school with the quicksand experiment.  I have to say, I wasn’t really wanting to deal with all the mess but it was pretty cool.  And right up Max’s alley with the hands-on stuff.  He talked about it all day.  In fact, check out the first entry of his own blog. He was so happy to get his own blog.  Who knows what fun we’ll be having with that this year!