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First Day of School

Well, I don't want to jinx it, but if every day goes as well as today .. we are going to have a great year!

Here are some before-school photos .. and he thought he was going to get out of the paparazzi-fest just because he wasn't going to public school today like the other kids. Yeah, right! He should know me better than that!



Dawson and his teacher

Dawson and the principal

Do you know what I like about homeschooling? Where can you go to school and get away with kissing your teacher? And even better, where can the teacher get away with kissing her student? I did that lots today!


He thinks I'm the cutest teacher he has and I think he is the most popular student.

If I am good at nothing else, I am good at planning! Our schedule went along perfectly today! We got a little bit of a late start because we had to take our little two to their elementary school this morning. Dawson got to go with us. That's one of the perks of being homeschooled! He will also be volunteering in their classes once a week starting tomorrow afternoon. He got to see his former kindergarten teacher who is now Eli's first grade teacher. That was fun!

We started school at 9:30 a.m. and got right into it. (He had gotten up earlier in the morning and showered, eaten breakfast, cleaned up his room, gotten dressed and read his morning devotion.)

We started with our A World of Adventure curriculum. As with most first-day-of-school curriculums, we had a fairly light day. We did Bible reading, a writing assignment, vocabulary, social studies and science by about 11:00 a.m. The cool part about this curriculum is that it is all related to the Bible reading of the day. Very cool.

Here he is doing his work with his best buddy at his feet.


We had an Egyptian snack of plums, dates, figs and grape juice. I even brought him up a "finger bowl" to wash the stickiness off his fingers.


Before lunch we also did our Fine Arts assignment which consisted of making a Shabty out of clay. "Ancient Egyptians often included hundreds of shabties in their tombs. These small statues were magical servant figures that came to life and completed work for the dead person in the Netherworld. These shabties were made out of a material called faience, a type of ceramic made of crushed quartz or sand."
~ taken from the "To Live Forever" Gallery Guide from Philbrook Museum.

We made our shabties out of Sculpey clay and then baked and shalacked them for preservation.



Here they are baking with Dawson's lunch of mozzarella sticks. Might as well kill two birds with one stone!


And here was the finished product. (Yes, I had to get in on the fun!)



He also made a small pot out of the clay that he now has on his desk holding paper clips. And our shabties are sitting on our desks. We are hoping they will do our work for us tomorrow.

I gave him a break from noon to 1:00 p.m. for lunch and television. He chose to watch Phinneus and Ferb and would you believe that the epidode was about Egypt and mummies? I'm good, but not that good!


After lunch Dawson did the dreaded pre-algebra assignment. It took him almost an hour. Then he started reading the book The Capture from The Guardians of Ga'hoole series. You can see at this point he was done with the chronicaling of his day!


After correcting some pre-algebra problems he concluded school at about 3:00 p.m.

What a great first day of school! We have some fun things planned for tomorrow, too, although our schedule will be completely different with volunteer work in the afternoon and a field trip tomorrow evening.

Comments

  1. my oldest loved that book has read it many times :) let me know what he thinks of it.

    glad your day went well and was great, I bet you had a fun day. Hope to hear about his volunteer stuff too.

    LOVE his clay creations, I need/want to get some sculptey sometime for the girls.

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  2. forgot to say my girls LOVE Phinneus and Ferb its the only cartoon my girls will watch

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  3. Congratulations on a great first day!

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  4. YAY!!! Looks like a success!!! Made me want to be a student there, too!! Hope the rest of the year is as much a success!

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  5. Beautiful photos! Sounds like you had a wonderful first day. Mine's tomorrow.
    ~Julie

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  6. I read this post and the post about why you chose to homeschool this year, and I have tears in my eyes! I don't even know you, but I am sitting here so excited for you and wanting to cheer you on! May God richly bless you and your precious family! You are going to have an amazing year!

    ReplyDelete

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