Talk About the First Day of School

Click the button to visit more Talk About Tuesday posts.

I know that the idea is to do a little bit of a home tour for the first week of each month on Talk About Tuesday. I did promise a report on our first day of school though, so let’s stretch it just a little bit and I’ll introduce you to the “Big Comfy Couch” where we did most of our school work.

Princess Squeak will not let an opportunity to get in front of the camera get away from her.

This post was submitted to the Carnival of Homeschooling. Click the button for more information.

Our first day of school was interesting. I reminded Bugga the night before that she would need her sleep because we were doing school the next morning. She seemed excited. By the time she woke up yesterday she had lost all enthusiasm and moaned when I mentioned I was getting the last little bit of her school work gathered.

Of course, being the great procrastinator that I am, I waited until the last minute to print off some of the books we needed that I had been unable to buy. While doing this my printer decided to go on the fritz and froze up the queue with a print job that decided not to print and refused to be canceled. After several attempts at restarting the printer and restarting the computer I finally got that darn print job out of the way and was able to finish up my printing. Everything else was gathered and we were ready to go.

I gathered up the girls and told them that while we were doing school work I would need Bugga to pay close attention to me and Squeak would either need to play in her room or sit quietly in the room with us so she didn’t interrupt. I got a chorus of OKs and we were off to a good start.

Religion In Primary this month they are talking about Baptism and Confirmation. I printed off the corresponding chapters from Gospel Principles and Gospel Fundamentals and broke the reading into enough small segments to last us a whole month. One little breakdown by mom about paying attention to what I was reading instead of answering everything with, “Joseph Smith” and we were back on track. Or so I thought. As soon as I mentioned the Apostle Peter her response was, “But where’s Mary Jane?” Get it? Peter Parker – SpiderMan – Mary Jane. Yeah, it took me a second too. I stopped and explained that this was a different Peter. This Peter was an Apostle of Jesus Christ and we read about him in the scriptures. She seemed satisfied with that answer, but apparently she wasn’t because her response to the very next part was, “This part isn’t about Mary Jane either.”

Music Super simple. I just played our classical music selection and asked her how it made her feel. I asked her if she could dance to this music, what would the dance look like. She showed me.

Math The first lesson in our curriculum, because it’s actually made for a school setting, was to talk about how when other people are talking we pay attention. We’d already done that in the morning, so math was super simple too.

Poetry I somehow doubt she payed attention to the poem I read. I think she found a string to play with and got distracted. Squeak listened though, or at least she looked like she was listening.

Phonics We started our phonics a while ago and backed off when I decided she wasn’t ready yet. We did a quick review to make sure she remembered what had been covered previously and we were done.

Assigned Readings I decided to just go down the list of assigned readings and check them off as we went. First on our list was the story of Albion and Brutus from Our Island Story. It started out ok, but I could tell Bugga was having a hard time paying attention and understanding what the story said. I tried varying lengths of reading and asking her to narrate back, all with similar results. She would either repeat what I had just said or go off on some other tangent completely. When we got to the part where it first mentioned the mermaid, all she could think about after that was Ariel from The Little Mermaid. The one good point was when she stopped me after mentioning the yellow sands of the island to remind me that the story had already said they were golden sands, not yellow. Eventually she asked, “Are we done yet.” So we put the reading down. I guess we’ll finish up the last few paragraphs today and move onto the next story. Only one reminder to Squeak the whole time not to interrupt.

At that point, dad came home for lunch. My dreams of telling him how great our morning went turned into fits of laughter when I explained how she thought Peter Parker and Mary Jane were going to teach her about baptism and how she wondered if every mermaid was Ariel.

We never did get to our penmanship/copywork assignment, but we did manage to read a chapter from Charlotte’s Web together.

All in all, our day had its ups and downs just as I suspected it would. At least now I have an idea of what to expect and what needs more work.