First day of school

I was planning to start school tomorrow, with the rest of the Slavic world, but I think a good part of our September 1 will be taken up with music school. Plus, I had everything ready, and my students were excited. So, we started yesterday.

Ready to start

The night before I put out new drawing notebooks and stickers with our first bouquet of fall. I wanted to do a special breakfast, too, but that just didn't come together. And they were happy enough as it was! I didn't think the little presents and lessons would be quite as exciting as they turned out to be. At breakfast we read a short Bible passage, some poetry (I loved the first one!), and started to work on memorizing Psalm 1. Then they did some serious drawing and stickering. That wasn't assigned, but it couldn't be put off until later. And that was all for morning school. Outside time is still one of the most important parts of our education, so that's what we did next.

Stickers!

А - Арбуз

Then, after lunch, we settled down for the main part of our school time. This is where I still need to work out some logistics (or just wait for Will to get home), but it went really well overall. My plan was for Jaan to lie down with Asya and help her get to sleep, while I did Raia's one lesson with her. Raia is begging for more, but I keep telling her that she's not in school yet. She's just preparing for school. Anyway, Asya wasn't quite asleep when it came to Jaan's turn for school, and she didn't stay in bed for long. Sigh.

Raia's reading lesson

Math!

Jaan got to do a lesson of his beloved math, work on handwriting (we don't have the book yet, so we're using the online samples), read a Russian history story to me, listen to some music, hear me read the first of the Ambleside Online selections to him, then--his favorite--watch ten minutes of a cartoon in Ukrainian for foreign language.

Poor Asya bounced back and forth between bed and the room where we were. Finally, I got her to sleep after everything was done, but that didn't work well at all, because her nap was too late. Today was about the same, but we just made a place for her with us, and she finally fell asleep listening to Jaan's history reading. Again late, though.

Too much history? (today)

Also, I've had my favorite teenager coming over for English lessons every afternoon, so there's a little more schooling to fit in after our own school time. We've been reading picture books together, working on verb tenses and vocab. We did Simple Present tense with my childhood favorite book, I Am A Mouse, and Simple Past with a W family favorite: Who Said Red. Today I think we'll move on to Simple Future and conditional sentences with If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.