Stay-For-School

So we started our own little home-style school today. I'm calling it Brick House Home Education, for obvious reasons.  Our offspring are officially excused from the public schools, so I am not looking for any truant officers just yet.  I am brewing a second pot of coffee just now, in case anyone reading was concerned about the cohesion of this post.  Maybe cohesion is not the word I want; but until I have more caffeine tainting my blood stream, the brain part of me is not working at its best.  This is great for a teacher, even better for a teacher dealing with the truth of the old adage "Familiarity Breeds Contempt."  Adage, smadage is what I say.  GBaby is familiar with me, and also contemptuous of my sleep needs.

Let's just focus on the good parts of today, ok?  It will help, no doubt, if I use pictures.

After our morning chores were completed and our hairs brushed, we started our school day with a Psalm. I blinked back a tear while I listened to their sweet voices read the ancient prayer. They giggled at the line, "I am a worm and not a man," and we stopped to explain that the writer of the Psalm felt like a worm, not that he actually was a worm.  My heart was gripped with a tiny fragment of truth I'd never considered: "Who cares about worms? No one. Except the One who made them. So even though King David felt like he was a worm and no human cared about him, he could know that God still did. That's why he was praying."

"Dad and I care about worms, Mom. Because they're good for the garden."
That's going to be another fun part of keeping them home; they already know something about everything. [INSERT WRY SMILE HERE.]

After the worms in Scripture discussion, we reviewed our plan books, text books, markers, pencils and everything else we could possibly ask questions about.  Then we did a little first-day-of-school journaling, using an adorable printable I found at Positively Splendid.  We measured and recorded our height and weight (and not one child asked me to get on the scale! Winning!) and stepped outside for the obligatory first day pictures.


Fourth Grade!

Third Grade!



First Grade!

Preschool!



General distraction of cuteness.

These are crazy good pictures, right? With everyone barefoot and squinting into the morning sun you might wonder why I bothered.  We're getting professional pictures taken tonight (yay! for photographers in the family!) and I've got a little surprise for them this afternoon.  So we'll have plenty more pictures today.

After our mini photo shoot, we settled back down with our reading and math books. Just in time for GBaby to melt into emotional chaos.  Just in time for my first disciplinary problem of the day.  Just in time for lunch and the back yard sunshine!  Everyone crated their books up, stashed them neatly in the closet that we cleaned out last night (a terrible terrible choice in timing on my part, worthy of its own crazy post) and called it a half-day. 

It is still summer, see? And I'm just trying to ease into this school year thing.  Plus there is that whole less-than-five-hours-of-sleep-thing I've got going on.