Reagan's First Day of Kindergarten (07.18.2011)

Today was Reagan’s first day of kindergarten. (click here for pictures)  We decided to start a little bit early because we will be out of town soon for the beach and probably off a few days for baby 5’s arrival.  Reagan has been so excited about started school.  She picked out her outfit last night and was ready to go as soon as we woke up.  We did have to start in the afternoon even though I mentally have the perfect normal morning schedule planned for us to do school.  But since we won’t have a normal day around here until 2013, the afternoon will work.  And it probably was the best way to start school because we started school while Campbell was taking her nap.

So here is what all we did today:  First we did our calendar which was my favorite subject in school.  Then we did our calendar board (I don’t really have a better name for it).  But it includes skip counting, the first few verses of our Bible passage we are memorizing, a count of the days in school, a clock, our thermometer, our weekly character trait as well as a few other things on it.  We also found a state on the map, worked on our books of the Bible and also practiced the Star Spangled Banner.  That sounds like alot but we zoomed through all of this in a decent amount of time.  Most of these things will stay the same throughout the week but some days we will do a few different things.
Reagan was as serious as she could be during all of this and taking it all in.  She was trying so hard to be the perfect student and she was.  Anderson and Graham were also working hard at listening.  Graham played along for over an hour and then he told me he was ready to take a nap and I sure wouldn’t turn that request down.  After Anderson was finished with his work, he snuck over to the train track and played quietly which was also wonderful.
Next up was Reagan’s work boxes.  She had her daily notebook which has her dolch (site) words, her own calendar, a weather and birthday graph and work on tally marks.  Then we did her first math lesson (Math U See-Primer).  She watched the teacher on the tv and was all ears.  She was even a bit stressed out that she wouldn’t know what he was talking about-but it was not a problem and she breezed through those sheets.  Next up was spelling (All About Spelling-1).  We reviewed all of the phonemes and though she knows most sounds, we still have more to learn (like all 4 sounds that o makes or most of the other vowels since they make so many sounds).  By now she was breezing through her boxes-read a short story, did her phonics work (Explode the Code-1), did a letter search, a lesson in our yellow book (Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons-we are on lesson 70 but just do 1/2 each time), sight word writing, another worksheet and picture search for fun.  Finally we finished up with working on her first day of school book. 
The boys had things to do-cutting practice, coloring, making a letter A with magnets, Anderson read a story to me and things went fairly easy. 
Finally, we worked on scratching off letters onto our rocks.  Reagan and Anderson were all into it until they realized how hard it was and a bit time consuming.  So I ended up finishing off the letters which was fine-they had worked hard during the school day.
Overall, it was a pretty good first day.  I have a few things that need to be tweaked but that will be after this week.  Figuring our how we will do school with Campbell up will be another challenge but it will all work out.  Reagan is just as excited about tomorrow’s school because she peeked into her boxes and saw that we are making jello (got to start off with a bang!)

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