2015 School Launch! {Inside our first week.}

Our little family has successfully kicked off the 2015-2016 school year and we are having a blast so far. We’ve been kicking butt and taking grades! What exactly have we been up to? Well, since we have decided to officially start on July 1st each year, our first week of lessons will mostly revolve around American history and the 4th of July. We were very fortunate to have friends around for our first week and they got to join in on one of our crafts.

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For this year, I really wanted to focus on some basics. {What country do we live in? Can you say The Pledge of Allegiance? What is the 4th of July? How many Stars and Stripes does our flag have? What is the meaning behind the Stars and Stripes on our flag?} I picked out five books that we read together: America is…, A is for America, Red, White, and Blue: The Story of the American Flag, F is for Flag, and L is for Liberty. Then we discussed some of those main points as well as a few others throughout the stories. We didn’t complete one of our planned crafts but we did finish the flags with our friends, an activity using glue, salt, and colored water at home, and had some seriously silly fun dancing to a 4th of July poem I found on Pinterest.

Along with 4th of July, Aryanna has completed all of her scheduled writing and math lessons even if we modified the timeline a bit. We were on vacation after all! For her writing, we have chosen to go with the Handwriting Without Tears program. We made some alterations to it to fit her personal level and I will share a review of how it is going once we have some more experience with it. She’s using Abeka’s 1st grade arithmetic curriculum for math and so far it’s been fabulous. While we may need some extra work to keep her on track, it was closer to where she is than the K5 curriculum would have been. We do have the K5 books though and I will share how we chose to go with the 1st grade and why as well as some samples of both very soon. Be on the lookout for a full list of our choices and how we got there. I promise, it’s coming soon!