First Day of School

My baby is a First Grader. sniff sniff.

Last night, I left Cameron his traditional First Day of School Copywork: "My name is Cameron. I am in the first grade." Of course, Greyson got to it before he did and scribbled all over it. I had been considering whether or not he needed smaller lined paper anyway so I decided to give him a piece of story paper for his copywork and a self-portrait. Can't ask for a better yearly keepsake than that!

I had him get started on that almost as soon as he woke up. He tried to put it off, but I didn't want to start the day (or year) with a bunch of procrastination. He worked diligently on a pencil drawing of himself and his friend S6 playing with LEGOs together at our long dining room table. ("I need to make it a really long table because I have lots of friends!")

Next came phonics and we did a lesson on the long /oo/ sound without a single complaint. He read better than I've ever heard. We followed that up with a review section in math (just happened to be where we stopped) and he breezed through that like nothing. There were a couple problems, near the end, where he thought about it wrong - like adding instead of subtracting - and then couldn't work his brain around the right way to do it for a long time. But that was only two problems in four pages so I think that was mostly fatigue.

After that, I let Cameron take a break and go shower and dress for the day while I worked with Cassia for a while. She chose to work on math and did about 5 pages! She even went ahead and did several pages while I was getting Cameron out of the shower. And she did them right!

Finally we moved on to history and I read the first section in Story of the World Volume I, What is History. Though I heard a few complaints like "Do we have to do history??" they were both interested and involved in the reading. They answered all the rhetorical questions and answered them thoughtfully. Then we flipped through the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, read a little on pirates, lol, and then read the introduction of what history means. They were less interested in this - it's written at a much higher grade level - but did not interrupt. Then I explained the Family History activity that we were going to do and left them to play while I went to go make some copies for said project (DH was working from home).

When I got back, they both were actually interested in coloring the covers for their family history albums which was a big surprise since Cameron never wants to color! Cassia even colored a timeline of her life and we filled in a few important dates. Neither has had the motivation to do any interviews of family members for this history, but I figure that it will be an ongoing project anyway for at least the next week or two.

We finished all of our bookwork by 11:00 which was a HUGE stress relief on my day. I felt so free! So I cleaned and they played until it was time to go to gymnastics. Both of them moved up into higher level classes today and Cassia did fabulously! You could tell that she was really being challenged by what they were asking her to do but she just kept trying. I was very proud of her determination. Cameron took another approach to the challenges of a new class - he lay down on the gym floor and claimed he was too tired to do anything. Or that it was too hot. Or it was too hard. Or that he had hurt himself (doing what I don't know). *sigh* It was really hot in the gym and it was really late in the afternoon... but still. I couldn't help being annoyed. Especially after all the talking we had done during Cassia's class about how the classes from now on advanced through ability, not age, and after all the dreaming that Cameron was doing of being on the team and winning gold trophies. One of the coaches did say that he had seen a lot of stuff like that today though. He said there were several move-ups who refused to even go onto the floor, so at least Cameron made some effort. There was a whole different feel to the class so hopefully next week will be better when he knows what to expect. Watching them though, and the girl's team who was also practicing at the same time, made me want to take lessons too. They do offer adult lessons... maybe when Greyson is older.

Tomorrow is a busy day. Cassia has ballet first thing in the morning and then we are off to a playdate that will probably last all day. Second day of school and we will probably already get ourselves behind, lol. If I'm lucky, we'll leave D's house at a decent time, Cassia and Grey will fall asleep in the car on the way home, and then Cameron and I can get a little schoolwork done before dinner. If not, I suppose we could do History Monday/Thursday and Science Wednesday/Friday. I left our Friday schedule pretty open for just such an occasion anyway.

In other random news, I just spent a ridiculous amount of money at Rainbow Resources today. I was good too and only bought the next level of math and science books and nothing extra! It's going to get really expensive when I have to buy for three! I can't wait to get that new box though!!! :)