First Day of School

Jude turns 5 on Wednesday and we decided if we were going to send him to school we needed to wait until next year....but everyone is starting school - all of Jude's friends and his most beloved cousin are starting kindergarten. So naturally Jude has been talking non-stop about starting school also.

So we decided to try out homeschooling this year. I spent lots of time deciding which curriculum to use and asked advice from homeschool moms I know and talked with the kindergarten teacher at the Connection School, where Chad works and finally picked something that will facilitate learning but not be too much and too terribly structured for this our first year but will hopefully enable us to learn all the things a kindergartner needs to learn.

I have grown pretty excited about trying this new thing out. Jude was pretty excited to. And this is where we are learning a valuable lesson on expectations and disappointments...

Jude hated our first lesson. The curriculum I chose is Five in a Row. The concept is that you read the same story five days in row and you draw your language, social studies, math, art and science lessons from the story. Sounds great to me. The boys love stories and beg me to read all day to them. So I thought this would help us to learn how to learn reading stories and create a love of learning through reading (sounds wonderful, right?). We read our first story this morning and attempted to learn about fear from the story....Jude didn't want to talk about the story and he didn't want to listen to a story. He wanted something exciting...he threw a huge tantrum and ended up in his room...

I sure felt like a failure - how's that day 1 of school - then I made it worse by logging into chad's Facebook account where I got to see all these happy first day of school faces...and happy first day of homeschool faces (complete with the perfect school room)....yes I must say I thought about scraping the rest of the year - I mean hey I could just send him to school next year...but I don't think I should give up so easy.

Upon talking with Jude I realized I had not explained to him what school would look like for us and how we were going to approach learning and saw that he really does want to learn he just thought it would be different today.

We finished up our school day with doing our first lesson from Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and making a surprise for a friend complete with coloring and cutting paper (which is what Jude thought school was). Jude did great for his first reading lesson and enjoyed his little crafting. So we ended on a happy note.

Hopefully tomorrow's Five in a Row lesson will go much better!