First Day Photos

With all three boys officially registered with the Department of Education for homeschooling, we are at full capacity this year. The boys and I have been chomping at the bit to start this school year. So it is with much excitement that I post our "First Day of School" photographs.

Monster - (nearly) 12 years old 

Monkey - 8 years old 

Munchkin - 5 years old

First Day Photos

The First Day of School

The first day of school has arrived and though I only have one registered student, I am teaching as if I already have a full "class" of three students.

Unfortunately my photos don't catch everything we did on our first day... but we were busy enjoying ourselves so consider these a taste, or perhaps the highlights!

 Monkey took his postcard of the Ring-Tailed Lemur that I bought him at the zoo and copied the picture (with some help from me) onto another piece of paper and coloured it in!  I was impressed with his self-direction and his diligence. He also handled it fairly gracefully when he didn't feel the drawing perfectly matched the photograph.

Monster started writing another Angry Birds book complete with illustrations.

 The two older boys and I have all started gratitude journals.

Monster and I write our own and Monkey dictates to me and I write it for him.

Our letter of the week for this first week of school is "Ff" so Monkey pasted feathers on a capital letter F.  He will do lots of crafts and activities for each letter of the week and I will display his work in an A3 art display book.

I bought a Handwriting Without Tears book from a friend of mine and it is perfect for Monkey.

Just enough work to make him feel like a real student without frustrating him.

First Week of School

Here are the highlights from our first official week of school!

Monkey gets some assistance and some supervision from Munchkin while he works on an alphabet puzzle. 

Working on an alphabet matching game I made for him. 

Monster has turned into an avid and voracious reader over the summer holidays.  He is able to read chapter books right now and will easily read a book of about five chapters in length over the course of one day.  He enjoyed reading this particular book while I worked with Monkey on the activities photographed above. 

Monkey enjoyed working on his Starfall computer reading program while I instructed Monster on his written work (see photo below). 

Monkey also chose some other activities on his own... Design Discoveries (above photo) and Magic Mosaic (photos below).  Both were games that my siblings and I enjoyed when we were in school and I LOVE seeing my children experience them now.

I was very pleased with how Monkey worked with the Magic Mosaic.  The only help he would accept from me was a little bit of fixing of the pieces if he bumped it.  He concentrated and stuck with it until he had a design he was happy with. 

Some of our read aloud selections for our first week.  The two older boys are obsessed with Magic School Bus - the books and the DVDs.  As part of our history this year we have started out with a book about the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  When we finish reading we will spend a day in the city touring The Rocks and looking closely at the Bridge.  Finally I LOVED Judy Blume as a child and read the first two books in the Fudge series... I was thrilled to find she has written two more and the boys and I devoured them! 

 Carrying over from last year is our daily Bible reading and character study books!