The first day of first grade

Well, today is the first of our new 12-month school year, L's first grade. We had a graduation "ceremony" yesterday at L's insistence, where we all sang "Happy Graduation to You" and she passed out mini carrot cupcakes to our friends who were visiting us here in New Paltz.

I did some late night preparation for the first day, but felt pretty prepared. Ummmmm....nope. Wasn't prepared at all, it turned out. L requested that we start the day with Science. I whipped out my science curriculum, which I had copied and pasted from the Tanglewood website nature study curriculum, and all it said was "Study the movement of sun and time." I drew a total blank. Though I had read that thing over and over again in all my prep work, I never noticed that it actually doesn't tell you how to study the sun and time. Woops. I did some lame scrambling, read out loud to her from some book I found on the sun and tried to pretend we were done. L was pretty unimpressed.

Things went a little better after that--we did the introduction to the Story of The World (luckily L is excited to do it again, though we've already gone through the first few chapters already) and did a fun game identifying the continents. Later I read aloud Kipling's How the Whale Got Its Throat from the Just So stories and we did a narration.

We broke for lunch out on our deck, enjoying the sun and breeze and yummy fruit salad, then started math lessons with one from the Center for Innovation in Mathematics. It's interesting, as it introduces from the beginning mathematical concepts that most math courses save till much later on, for example, this morning's lesson on using the notations for more than, >, and less than, <. We're skipping around with that because while it brings in advanced concepts early, it also takes a long time to get to higher numbers (it gets to the number 10 only several weeks in), so will use it in conjunction with Singapore Math.

Now we're taking another break, and still have reading to finish. It's turned out to be a much longer day than I expected, but I think it will go more smoothly as we get into a rhythm and I learn how to be prepared (!). And know what to skip.