Our first day of school 2016
It’s back to school time. Hopefully your faces don’t look like Jentzen’s does on your first day back?!!?
Here is Madelyn, filling out her All About Me poster. We made these out of Xerox printer paper that my husband had brought home from work. My friend Tammy, wrote out a bunch of things like what is your favorite food, book, movie, etc. Draw a picture of you, your family, or your pet. What do you like best about homeschool….etc. Then we took photos of our children holding onto them to keep for their “school memories.”
We had a back to school party at our library last week. It was a good day to hang out at the library. One of those drizzle rainy days, where you feel like just chilling and that is what we did. Here are Jadyn, Brooklyn, and Autumn filling their posters out.
Here is my Autumn doing hers.
Elizabeth filling in her chart. She made a photo of her family, complete with her new aunt’s pregnant baby tummy:) 
Then the children sat around the table and Summer brought Emoji cookies. The children had a fun time decorating them. Who doesn’t love sugar on top of sugar?!!?!?! 
We played Homeschool Bingo, Would you Rather, and had a fun time just hanging out. 
You can click here to print off any of the pages that we used for our party.
Here is our librarian Ashley, a former homeschooling student. We thank her for allowing us to do our get togethers at the library. It started out last year with just myself and one other mom. But we consistently stayed at it and in one years time, we have 15 people coming, if they can. We are going to be going to our local community Fire Hall and apple orchard this next week. We will be baking treats and making cards as a thank you to the workers. It is a good time to teach our children to be thankful for the workers that volunteer their time to help out in an emergency situation.
Then yesterday, we had our first day of school. I really debated starting because we are going to be moving, but I realized it only takes them a few hours each day to get it done and it will be good to keep them working at something. Jadyn got up early as she was eager to start. Last year we did a lot of work where we were all together and it took a lot more time on my part. Not even knowing we were going to move, I am thankful that their schooling this year is more self sufficient. They took their binders and did their work on their own. A couple of times they would come back and ask for help but most they could do without any assistance.
Then here was Autumn, she is my laid back child. If she could sit and play dollhouse or tablet all day, she would. Last year she was my first grade drop out before Christmas?!?!?!? We allowed her that and then picked back up after the New Year. She completed her schooling by the end of the year and did great. She doesn’t struggle with it, she just doesn’t like doing it:) Today was more of a prying for her. I am like, “Let’s go do school,” and she was like, “I’m good, I don’t want to!” It was comical. By the afternoon, I got her to come and sit down for a bit and get her pages completed. She whizzed through them quickly and was back to playing. 
Brooklyn woke up after feeling poorly. Allergy season, but the only bad thing about being sick is that you can still do schooling. She curled up in her bed and got hers done. She rested most of the afternoon.
Evan got his work done early too. He is very good about getting what he needs to get completed so that he can go off and play his video games.
I, was able to run the home still pretty good. The little ones were playing and I decided not to start Kindergarten with them until after we move. To make the stresses of life easier on myself. I did a lot more cleaning and packing up of things. I am trying to focus on one room per day. At least getting it down to just the essentials. This will be my living room for the next few weeks. I just need to keep little ones out of the piles?!!?!? It was a warm day and by the afternoon the little ones were all playing in the pool.
I made a pot of spaghetti sauce early in the morning to make dinner easy. We did peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. Overall it was a good day. Busy,but a good busy. I like the method we are using this year and I think it is going to work great especially since we will be moving. I will still be able to sit down and do the schooling part that I need to do like learning the states and our read alouds for history but I won’t have to do it everyday.
If I had to rate today’s day on a scale of 1-5, 5 being the best….I would give it a 5!!! I have had many years where the first day was just not fun and I was not looking forward to day 2. But this year was good. Now that doesn’t mean that today isn’t going to be bad, but at least our first day went well. Hope you guys have enjoyed your first day back to school, if not, know that today is a new day. A chance to start over and begin again with a smile. Have a wonderful day!
