It’s finally here, our official first day of school!!!! It’s also the first year I took official first day of school photos…
I am surprised to say that our first day went rather well. We had one little “episode” this morning but I handled it very firmly and we had NO problems after that. Compared to the first day of school last year, I am very pleased.
Here is our daily schedule…which is bound to change…
You should be able to click it and enlarge. It is personal to us, so I can’t share a template or anything, but I will share that I made it in Excel and it works WELL, since it has all 4 family members on one. Ladybug fits in along with us, she doesn’t need her own row quite yet!
We followed the schedule almost to the minute and it went very well. Now, I am not saying the boys were pleased with the entire schedule, but for the most part they obeyed and had good attitudes. I honestly think they were ready to be back to a scheduled life, after such a long year of living differently almost every day!
We brought daily calendar time back as Krash enters into his transition year of Tot School. Calendar time is SUCH a great daily tool for young kids approximately ages 3-5. All kids can benefit from it, but I think it is most effective for these ages. Here’s what our set-up looks like so far…
I got the calendar from Oriental Trading a few years ago, it’s falling apart some now but still does the job! I made a folding board (got at Target) with the other stuff on it so I can slide it away easily. I will do a detailed post later with what we do and what is on it. Krash also has a special calendar time pointer (got at a teacher store), not quite sure what he was pointing at in this picture though!!! 😉
I am trying to have things to challenge both boys, here is one of P’s items, he writes in what day of school it is with a dry erase marker (it’s laminated), and will fill in the chart below…
We are also starting to create photo-learning books, starting with colors. I hope to stick with this. Today I asked K to choose a color on the board, he chose blue and then we went on a blue hunt around the house. I took a picture and made this 4×6 image in Photoshop to create an “I Spy” color book for them…
The boys haven’t seen it yet, I think they will be excited!!!! I am just going to print them and put them in a simple dollar store plastic album.
I am so thankful for our first day, for our family being well enough to even have a schedule again. After our year last year (for those of you new readers-my husband fought cancer and WON, and I was extremely sick throughout my pregnancy with Ladybug all last school year), a schedule is such a blessing. I am also thankful for my husband bringing back our morning family prayer time. You can see that we have it on our schedule before our day begins. It was nice, we even started a family prayer journal together. God is so good, I am so blessed!