A Royal Battle

We began the day with our new hundreds board.  It offered lots of opportunities for pattern finding, number review, and counting.

In history, we learned about two kins of ancient Egypt - the red crown king and the white crown king.  Kings, like sisters, sometimes have trouble sharing and they fought each other to be the only king.

Alas, the red crown king had to surrender his crown and land.

And the new symbol for the leader of a unified Egypt became a white crown with red on top.

Can you feel the power?

The new royalty had no problems with a review of shapes and ordinals.

A big hit was the new geometric solids bag.  You pull a wooden shape out of one bag and then feel in the other bag for the shape that matches it.  Look at those thinking faces!

Field Trip: Science Museum

Today we went to the Frisco Science Museum with our buddies Olivia and Avery.  We had a great time - there were so many hands on activities to keep us busy!

This one was tricky!  You had to raise the ball with both hands and if one hand ahead of the other, you have to figure out how to keep the ball from dropping.  It really made Zoe concentrate, but she got very good at it after a few tries!

Getting organized

This is our new system and so far we love it!  Every day, I list what each girl needs to do (stars are work with Mom) and what we will do together.  They can mostly choose the order they do things in and can erase it when they're done.  They like having some control and seeing what's left in their day.

This is one of our new Montessori activities.  Lucy lines up the golf tees in order 1-10 then has to balance a marble on top.  She loves this (even though she prefers to push them all the way in).

We are working on number families.  Zoe figures out all the ways to make 7.

And back to All About Spelling level 2. 

We started Story of the World Vol. 1.  I can't get excited for some reason but maybe I will.  We talked about ancient nomads and the first farmers.  We also made a time capsule so people in the future can learn about us.  Daddy is going to help us bury it soon.

In science, we talked about organizing and putting things into categories.  We dumped all our school supplies in a pile and re organized them.  A bit of a boring way to start science, but better things are coming...

After a swim with Blake, a playdate with a neighbor, it was time for musical rehearsal!  Whew!

What time is it?

Unlike most of our friends, we were not asking this as the alarm went off this morning, but as a rousing game of "trick your sister" was played with our clocks (and with smoothies of course).

Zoe felt like a first grader - on her schedule was reading, grammar, math, geography, and handwriting.  Whew!  It's hard work to fit it all into 3 days a week.  We enjoyed our first grammar lesson though.  We added phrases to make complete sentences.  My favorite: "The baseball player...... found a wife."  Sigh.

Lucy enjoyed the new items on her shelf.  Her favorite was wood polishing (a bit of a dud in my opinion - need to tweak that one) and handwriting using her new dry erase board.  You can put any page inside.

...and we revisited some old favorites.

Then, we had a celebratory late lunch, a rest, a quick play date, and dance class.

I am wishing we had done something a little more fun for the first day back, but it is what it is.  The first of school is so full of excitement and fresh starts and new clothes, it's a bit of a hard time to be a homeschooler.  But a mom of a fellow first grader told me her daughter was asked by another girl if water had calories in school today, so I did feel better...  No choice is perfect, but we had a great day.

Here we go again!

Well, we took the summer off (if by taking it off you mean camps, playdates, VBS, horseback riding, musical rehearsal, traveling to see family, swimming, and sleepovers).

I thought we would start back July 15, then Aug 1, then Aug 15, but we are set to start on Tuesday.  In many ways it makes sense to school when it's so hot here (107 today) but all our friends are home and wanting to play, so we will just start when they do.

Our school room is ready to go!  Here it is...

This year, I cut the spines off of almost all our books and put them in notebooks.  Then, I pulled out 6 weeks of work at a time and put them into folders.

Our big purchase this year - check out that dry-erase board!  Yay!  

Thanks to Daddy for uncrating 3 of those bad boys (2 were donated due to scratches and dents)!

These are Lucy's shelves - I have put quite a bit of time into making materials for her.  Some will be very typical Montessori, some preschool skills, some Kindergarten work, but I hope to rotate them enough so that she will stay engaged when I am working with Zoe.