First week of school

As I have mentioned, last week was our first week of school. Chloe is in 3rd grade this year! This is Chessa's first official year of kindergarten, but it will be very unofficial. She did join us for circle time every day though.

It was really a very gentle beginning, with the main focus being celebrating autumn. We did a wonderful orchard circle time which we have done every autumn since Chloe was 6. The girls love it, they will never tire of it. We will only do it for the one week though since we done it for so many other years. It is from Let Us Form a Ring, an Acorn Hill Anthology. This is one of my favorite resources for circle time activities, and really helped me to understand how a circle could move, flow, breathe... I have another favorite too, which I will tell you about later in the week.

We are trying to make sure we get started on lessons early enough in the morning, about 9 or 9:30. Our morning Tuesday was a bit delayed though as we had to spend about an hour in the garden and kitchen rescuing the half frozen swiss chard. Several giant bowls full, have a which is now in the freezer, the other half has been made into soup and eaten.

We didn't really have a main lesson for the week. I just took the time to get us back into our rhythm, and introduce some of the new ideas we would be working with this year. One of which was a spelling list and special English notebook. Our spelling words for the week focused on autumn, apples, orchard, etc... We did 10. I told Chloe we would play a spelling game at the end of the week. (Spelling quiz!) She loved it. There was also some math review time. And lots of flute playing, which I wasn't sure we would get to the first week, but Chloe wanted to, and we learned a new song.

So it all went really well. (Especially since we were also dealing with the whole daddy being gone and crazy hospital incident!) Tomorrow we start our first main lesson block, Old Testament stories. I have been doing some watercolor painting practice in the evenings, want to do some more with that tomorrow night. For tonight I am going to again read through our Creation story from Roy Wilkinson's book, and then see if I can come up with an idea for Form Drawing tomorrow, something I forgot about last week!

Of course I have no recent photos for you, but here are some I never posted of more 2nd grade school work. They are from what we were calling a word family book, but I kept struggling with how exactly we wanted to approach the work. So here are a few pages that we came up with. You may have to click on them to make them bigger to see well enough.

(No, there are not 7 pictures. Let's just be impressed if I actually post every day like I said I would.)