Day 1

I almost feel like I should be singing It's the End of the World as We Know It.  I mean it is, right?  Once your child starts school it's not like they ever stop the educational process until they're old enough to be out of the house.  Thus, family life as we know it now involves school!

That's right--school has begun.  Okay, I admit that we almost chickened out this morning, but we did have our official first day of school.  My son was a little leery at first, so I went through our schedule backwards and started with the history story.  That was the hook.  My son enjoyed our history lesson so much that he was almost begging to start phonics, math, and everything else on our agenda.  Woohoo!  I think the mom-the-teacher and son-the-student thing is going to work.   And as an added bonus, my nosy little three year old sat in on half of our lessons and enjoyed them about as much as his brother.

What surprised me the most about our classroom time was how quickly my son whipped through our schedule.  The classroom setup is not completely foreign to me.  I have substitute taught in an actual classroom and I am a teacher's kid, so I have some frame of reference for how to plan a day.  But I had no idea that the one-on-one schedule was so different. 

For example, I was expecting our recitation portion of the day to take about 30 minutes.  We were supposed to have our opening prayer, recitation of the alphabet, and discussion of the letters in the alphabet.  When we actually did our recitation this morning, it only took us 3-5 minutes.  In a real classroom it would have taken that long to get everyone to stand up together and get quiet.  This extra time allotment is so exciting.  It just means more time to learn!

The best part of our day was the fact that my son is already excited about tomorrow and can't figure out why I'm going to make him wait until Friday to do our tree discovery walk.  Now I'm just hoping and praying that I can keep up his enthusiasm until he's in college.  And for that matter, I'm hoping that I will be enjoying my days with him as much then as I am now.