Day one completed...

So we actually got a little more work done than I had anticipated.  I am for sure going to have to sit with them while they do their work because they can't seem to stay on track for more than 3 minutes at a time if I am not in visual range.  Thankfully I can see the school area from the kitchen so I will be able to do some minor cooking during the day. I am going to set up a computer station where I can have my laptop out there and be comfortable and get some of my stuff done too.  Brad and I are going to excavate the "basement" room where we have all of our junk stored and try and make that into the school room.  It also has a bed in there which would be prefect for me when I have bad days. Not to mention we could reclaim our guest room!  Makes me glad I got that nice wooden bed/couch desk a couple years ago.  I will have my own portable table.

I ordered another curriculum today - Accelerated Achievement or A2.  I like the RC but I want more material available and maybe some other choices fore reading and such.  RC and A2 get compared all the time and the whole A2 curriculum is only $99 so I figured it would help me out to get it. Plus it looks like all the boks are there in PDF format which would make it simple for me to move them over to the readers since my goal is to never have to print out a school book for them.  So anyway onto our first day.

We went over rules and regs and here is how we are starting off:
School starts at 10 am - they must be in their seats, water on their coasters and ready to go at or before 10am. 
10-12 pm - They work on math for 2 hours, and I am to see all their completed and corrected work.
12-1 PM - An hour of Writing/English,  which includes handwriting, composition, spelling, grammar and vocabulary depending on what we are working on. (one thing per day).   I have agreed to allow each of them to do some free style story writing that I will also go over and correct in the writing time as well.

1-1:30 - 30 minutes for lunch, we rotate each day who makes lunch (yes I take a turn LOL), and the person making lunch gets to count 15 minutes of their lunchmaking as school time.  Lets just call that time Home Ec.
1:30 -3:30  we return for reading time.  Reading time includes history, Social Studies, Science and other things depending on what books they are reading.  It also includes non-essay testing for whichever subject/book they are reading or working in.  I put Pierce under pain of book removal from his reader if I ever catch him reading non-school books during school time since he has some fun type books on his reader.  He was NOT happy with that which makes me think he has been planning on cheating and reading what he wanted instead of what was assigned LOL.


I am sure we will have to adapt the rules some and maybe add or change thngs as we go along, but for now we are ready to go.  They each did an hour of math and an hour of reading then had friends knocking on the doors since today was a half day.  So we were done just after noon today.

 I picked up Pierce's Trombone today and discovered that if I want to drive him to school 5 days a week for an hour he can join the band class and still be homeschooled.  Not sure if I can cope with this or not so I am going to talk to the Band director about the minimum number of days he would need to be there if he is also taking private lessons.  Anyway it is a possibility if not for this year then maybe for next. I have to go back anyway since his mouth-piece was not included in his trombone case so it will give me a chance to talk to the teacher again.

A good first day - I am a bit tired but I spent a lot of time being busy today so that is to be expected.  Time to go have dinner and rest a bit.