School's in Session

Well, school began again this week and it went pretty well. I am enjoying the curriculum we're using. Harry wasn't too thrilled about starting school at first, but declared 'it wasn't too bad' by the time we finished up today. Kathy was bursting to start. She is so excited to begin reading and has been asking about it throughout the holidays. We've been working on the sounds in her phonics handbook and today she sounded out and read three words all by herself! She was so proud of herself and so was her mom, of course!
Since we have a 9 month old baby in the house we try to do school when she is sleeping. School usually takes 1 1/2-2 hours unless we decide to do a craft. At about 11am we have our morning time. This is when we do all of the subjects that are combined - Bible, history, memory work, hymn, music, art, science/nature study and poetry. During one of Lilly's afternoon naps we do the other subjects - reading, copywork, literature read aloud, maths and geography. This is usually around 2:30/3pm.
It was a challenging first week. We had someone up from another church to help do some work on the building we are renovating to hold church services in. Most of the day Don was over at the building working. Then Lilly is still cutting teeth - her 7th in 7 weeks!  It was interesting doing school, making sure the house was tidy and everyone was fed properly! :)
The biggest success of our first week was nature study. I was determined to do it more regularly this year using The Nature Connection. And so far we have done it 3 times this week!  Even before starting the book, the kids found a caterpillar and wanted to keep him. So we drew pictures, took pictures and learned about caring for a caterpillar. We also tried to look up the species and see if we could find out what type of butterfly it would turn into. Then we read some in the book the next day about making a daily record of things we notice in nature throughout the day. The third day Kathy kept asking for her nature journal to draw what she had seen during the day (another caterpillar, a bee and cirrus clouds). It's been loads of fun! I never thought they'd get so excited about journaling!
I can't wait to plan next week!