Back to School

We have just completed our first week of First Grade. I would never have dreamed I would be starting school on August 3--it's just a little too "summertime" for me. But, when you have a baby coming right in the middle of the Fall, actually due on the first official day of Fall, you have to rethink things.

This week was really good, even better than expected. With the baby coming in late September, I felt much more pressure to really get organized this year, and it is paying off! I spent almost all summer picking books, ordering, ordering more, and finally planning once those orders came in. It was definitely a process, and sometimes quite stressful for me. I am a very slow planner and organizer, which can be frustrating when I'm thinking, "Why can't I just be done with this?" But oh how relieved I am now, since I literally planned every subject and every week up until December. It would have been nice to plan through May, but that's going a little too far for now!

My goal is to take a Charlotte Mason approach. She was an educator back in the late 1800's who truly believed in educating the whole child, and drawing them into a deep love of learning. Her most basic premise was to use real, "living books," which are NOT textbooks. They might include biographies and autobiographies from the time period being studied, or narratives that draw the listener into the heart of the subject being learned, whether it be about a bird or Ancient Egypt. She didn't want a fact simply told to a child and a child to be forced to memorize it, but the facts should be shared in story form so the child can sort of "drink deeply" while learning. As you read these books, the child then is to narrate them back, or tell the story back to you, and you can record it, or they can, or they can draw a picture, etc. I've found that there are lots of ways to accomplish this approach, and since my lessons are planned out and my copies are made, I feel more able to actually be creative with each new day.

We have been reading great books, and making our own books to slowly fill with information we've learned, definitions, narrations, drawings, etc. Amaleah has loved that part, and even came down from rest time one afternoon with more books she'd made: one for Spanish, Bible memory verses, and a miscellaneous one. Today we started a book made out of paper bags with each page layout to represent one day of creation. This will be a project we pick up every day.

The best part about the Charlotte Mason approach is her insistence on "short lessons." We have been following that, and thus are out of school by lunch. Nice! Now if I can only figure out what to do with Julia during her idle times....