Day One, Morning

Great start to the first day - I slept in and didn't get started until an hour after I intended. Ah well, that's part of the joy of homeschooling, right?

At 10am we began our morning routine. We started with weather and the date, which we wrote on the white board for everyone to see. Then we pulled up a picture of the flag on my computer, and stood with hands over our hearts and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. I am surprised and pleased to see that our children know the Pledge fairly well. Their comprehension of all those big words was rather low, though, and so we spent about 15 minutes going over what the words "pledge" and "allegiance" mean.

I explained that "pledge" means promise, but a legal promise, a "big P promise" as we call it around here. They understood that. We practiced using "pledge" in sentences, like, "I pledge to help mommy make pancakes next weekend," and things like that. They did pretty well. "Allegiance" was harder. I explained it as "working together" and "helping one another." So we pledged allegiance to our family.

After we were done with that, we tackled the idea of "the United States of America." They really didn't know what the USA was, as an abstract idea. I used GoogleMaps (thank you GoogleGods!) to bring up a graphical map of the world, and then carefully clicked in closer and closer, showing them first our continent, then our country, then the states that their grandparents live in, and their older brother and sister, and eventually our own state, district, and city. Thanks to the Maps function I was actually able to zoom in enough for them to see recognizable features of our new house, and the beach that is just up the road. They thought that was really exciting! Tomorrow we'll be doing the same thing, but backwards, working out from our house to our country, and talking about the different levels of things.

After saying a prayer for help in learning, we moved on to math. I did one on one with Mike, working on a number line to add and subtract numbers between 0 and 25. It took him a couple of moments to understand the process, but he rapidly figured it out and began zipping ahead. I left him to work on the math sheet (out of the first grade book, I might add!) and helped out Kayla with her math. She was doing a worksheet that touched on phone numbers, full name, age, and such. I corrected her backwards numbers, but other than that she figured it all out.

I'm using the white board and a large post it pad (huge) to go over things. I wrote out the Pledge, a general timeline for the day, and the outlines for an Autumn Acrostic poem and a Fall Senses walk. I think it's going pretty well! Recess is on right now, and they're bouncing around blowing up balloons and tossing them back and forth, as well as letting the air out to propel them around. There is much giggling going on here!