Eden's First Day (and mine!)

Well...I began my homeschooling adventure today.  I got most of Eden's curriculum in the mail the last couple weeks.  (Still missing her Bible curriculum and a couple random books.)  I was planning to start next week but Eden's been anxious to begin and I just realized that next Monday is Labor day and therefore messes the week up some so rather than waiting and starting on an odd week, I just decided to go ahead and jump in and see what happened!

I am using the "Hideaways in History" kindergarten program from Winter Promise.  So far, I think I'm going to like it.  After breakfast I started with the history reading.  This week we are learning about early people and civilization.  Eden struggled to really sit & listen.  She kept interrupting me with demands to move on.  When I asked her questions about what we read she said she didn't know and we had to go back and read parts of it again.  I'm thinking maybe I should start the day with a sit down activity like math or phonics and then do the history & science readings in between busy work.

After that we sat at the table and did an activity in her "Mastering Kindergarten Skills" book.  It was basically just a coloring page about how we are suppose to treat books.  After that we did a little review about ancient writing and we got on the internet and looked at pictures of cave paintings and talked a bit about them.  While I fixed lunch she worked on her own "cave painting" mural on a large piece of brown paper with markers.  I gave Jasmine one to work on, also.  They seemed to have fun with that.

After lunch, we got to handwriting & phonics.  The assignment for today was working with pre-letter forms.  Eden found this boring since she thinks she already knows how to write.  But since she still struggles to write top to bottom, left to right and often gets letters backward I thought it was important to work through the foundation.

My teacher's guide book also requested I teach her how to spell her first name today and write it tomorrow but since she already knows how to spell and write her name, I taught her to spell & write her full name.  She had a bit of a breakdown in the middle of the phonics/writing portion because she didn't want to do all that repetitive work...but she recovered nicely.

We then read our science text (which basically just covers the 6 days of creation and we'll probably easily get though that before the end of September) and Eden memorized Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."   On to math...which is Horizon's K math text.  Also a text which she will probably breeze through.  We went through six lessons in about 5 minutes.  It was way too easy for her.  I didn't have to teach her anything because it was all stuff she already knew.  Jasmine could have breezed though the "math" we did today!  The most difficult part for her was in writing the number two.   Once we got through that, I said a closing prayer and called it a day at about three.  She called Russ to tell him the verse she learned and whatnot and he told her how proud he was of her.

It was a fine first day.
I think it's going to be a good year!