Day 1

Well, we got the school year off to a great start. Daddy joined us this morning for Bible and he said a prayer and blessing for each child and me and for our school year. I can't think of another year when he has been with us for the first day, what a positive beginning!
With A(5) and J(6), we just did our reading this morning while E(2) climbed on us. I thought that it would be easiest to save the bookwork for E's naptime, at least for my sanity. After our reading, the littles went outside to play in the pool for a couple of hours and the big boys joined them for a break after lunch. By 1:30 we were back at the table for the bookwork portion of our day. Having Daddy home was such a blessing, he put E down while I got started on math with J. Then he came and did math with A, while I finished math with J and we got started on Language Arts. I think it is going to be difficult to balance working with the 2 of them at the same time because they both need my complete attention throughout their math and LA work. At least today, J had copywork, so I was able to start A on her LA while he laboured with the printing. We didn't make it to handwriting skills today, but that is okay, they did get some practice during LA.
The last thing I did with the littles today was science, we did some reading about animals. Good thing that was all, because they were both done.

My older boys worked mostly independently today. B(15) worked his way through all his Bible, Literature, History, Chemistry and Math alone. It took him from 9 until after 4, so I think this year will be quite labour intensive for him. R(13) worked until 4:30, but he did take a long bathroom break and he is easily distracted by what everyone else is doing and saying. We may need to set him up with a desk away from his siblings. And maybe some noise dampening headphones! He did most of his Bible and reading this morning and this afternoon he did Math and then we worked through his LA together. I think we will do about half of what the curriculum asks, at least at the beginning. Like one dictation a week as opposed to 2. He did work fairly diligently today though and I am proud of his effort. We do need to work Science into our day, but today was a good start.

As of today, we still have not decided what R will be doing this year. Will he home educate or will he go to Junior High? If he stays home, will we continue with a more traditional approach, like the Sonlight etc., or will we do cyber-school as he has requested? I really don't know. And I am not sure of where God is leading us on this issue. We only applied at one junior high and he was told they had no space for him. There are plenty of other schools, but I am really not sure where to even begin to look. We also have the opportunity to reapply at our first choice school, but I don't know if we should. We prayed that God would close the doors that were not His best for R. I kind of feel like God already closed that door, so do we really need to reopen it? More praying and investigation are needed to make this choice, I guess. I would really just like it to be done! I do know that I don't want to spend another year fighting with my beautiful son every day about school.