Beautiful Grace: Our first week!

The first week went GREAT!!!!! My boys had already been working throughout the summer so they pretty much had the hang of it. Our friends are still getting used to putting work away when finished and only taking one lesson out at a time. We are all strugging to get used to not talking across the room or in our case, across the house. I'm still tackling the stash and dash places in the office and dining room to prepare our lessons. I even had to cover some areas to keep the kids from getting into things that weren't ready for them. I really am not a slob, I just wasn't ready to start school when the kids were. I wanted to wait until September, they wanted to start now!

This will be the Math shelf once I have it all organized. The blue drawers are my craft supplies.

This will be our Language shelf.

The shelves in the back contain scrapbook supplies. Under the sheet are boxes that I need to go through. Some have already been unpacked.

This will be our Sensorial shelf. This photo was taken before the Math shelf was added to the room. The wooden desk has been moved out now.

This is my area for my work.

This area contains photo boxes that one of our friends kept getting into. I covered it and it seems to make a huge difference.

My office area. Not sure if there is help for this area or not......

Our dining room table. The things here are all to be made into lessons. It seems that the more I take off the table to put out on shelves, the more things that migrate to the table.

Music with Mrs. Brittany

We've started having a daily circle time so that the kids can learn to be quiet and still while in a group. This may prove to take a while! During our circle time we talk about the date, sing songs about the days of the week, months of the year and seasons, as well as read a short devotional for kids. Today we used a picture card to talk about our 5 Senses and will be exploring some lessons in this throughout the week. It's still VERY HOT here but you can tell the change of seasons is in the air. We are going to start putting out Autumn decorations this week just to help calm us down and trick our minds into leaving the lazy days of summer mode behind for a while.

The kids also enjoyed music time with a dear friend of ours last week and will be continueing that each week throughout our school year. They really enjoyed this! We took our first field trip, very impromptu, and went to the pet store to purchase new fish for our aquarium. The boys had a great week at school so Daddy gave them each $10 to purchase more fish, so we went back a 2nd time. In the first trip, we talked about the habitat of frogs (the boys wanted to put one into our aquarium) and that frogs will eat our fish when they get bigger. We also talked about salt-water/fresh-water fish as we decided which fish we wanted to put in our tank. On our second trip, we discussed this again and then wandered over to the other side of the store to look at the birds, rats, ferrets and other pets. Thankfully, the only pet that has made the Christmas list so far is a frog.

We got several new lessons throughout the week and will continue to add new lessons throughout our school year. Each box that gets delivered stirs up a frenzy in our house as we all rush to the door and tear the box open. I'm pretty sure that most of our Christmas list this year will be filled with materials for our classroom.