One More Week of Summer

Well, I have officially decided to wait until next week to start schooling at home. Their first day of school will be this Friday at the program I am teaching at. Then, we will start our own curriculum on Monday. So, 1st day of school followed by the weekend. How cool am I?

I have spent yesterday and today preparing things for homeschooling. I already had the curriculum and had a basic idea of what I wanted to do. But, we started to put a little structure to that plan yesterday.

Today, I sat down with the girls and gave them each a sheet of paper where they could write their own personal goals for the school year. I also wrote my own list of goals for them for the school year. When daddy got home, we went over all the list and adjusted where he saw a need.

Morgan's List

In case you can't read all that, it says learn alphabet in cursive, do school every 5 days (she means 5 days a week), do multiplication better, do devotions, do astronomy, listening better, keep desk clean and organized (that's my girl!), don't play (apparently all fun must stop when school starts), go to library every week, don't be mad when doing school, learn self-control, read more often, learn gymnastics.

Avery's List

You may notice a slight difference in the type of things on this list. She is my dyslexic child and if she messes up, just scribbles through and starts over. Her list includes: play jeopardy (this is a game in one of her classes at Foundations), be polite to boys (hopefully not too polite), learn astronomy, have self-control, reading better, stop asking for telescope (I love that this is a goal - by the way, she's getting one for her birthday), do chores better, be obedient, listen to teacher, be nice, help clean, don't be careless, learn gymnastics, don't use pizza card (this is also for the Foundations class. She wants to save some of her pizza).

Sydney's ListSimple and Sweet, just the way I like it. Her lists reads: read better, spelling, math, hand writing (apparently!!), listen (I'm assuming to me), playing nice.

And, here is my list for themI'm not going to type everything on mine. It's not nearly as funny and if you really want to know what it says, just click on the picture to enlarge.

I also put together a tentative weekly schedule. I am going to start this year splitting the school hours between morning and afternoon. I hope this goes well. We'll see. I'm sure there will need to be some minor adjustments as we get into a groove.

We also spent a little time passing out new school supplies. I say new, but I really mean free from CVS or $.01 from Staples. It was all the same to them though and it definitely helped to draw out some excitement over Largaespada school.

So, tomorrow we are going to spend some time clearing out their school desks and re-stocking them with our new supplies.

This is Morgan's Desk

These are the desks for the other 3 A good sign for me is that they keep asking when we are going to start school and if we are going to start tomorrow. Usually they are trying to talk me out of starting school. I think having the schedule and new things are getting them a little anxious.

So, here's to a good 2008-2009 school year!!