First Day of School with MFW ECC

 

I must admit, I was more nervous than excited to start this school year.  I bought this curriculum last June and was reading the manual every night, getting really excited.  But then I put it all away, thinking that September was soooo far off.  It seemed that way back in June, anyway. 

 

My spring/summer project in the living room and kitchen wasn't originally done with homeschooling in mind, but I did find a way to adapt what I'd done to our need to bring the schoolroom out in the open.  The small bedroom we used last year wasn't working well for two kids and now I was looking at three (sometimes four!) so I had to move our HQ. 

 

I originally had knick-knacks and cookbooks on these shelves that sit on each side of our doorwall**, but those had to make way for bins with school supplies and notebooks.

 

(**I use this word "doorwall" all the time for our sliding glass door that goes out to the deck and my Wisconsin friends make fun of me.  Is that a Michigan term?)

 

I bought fabric bins at Target so that the kids' supplies were out of sight and yet easy for them to find.  Sammy and Owen have their binders tucked on the side and William and Luke just have theirs filled with workbooks and coloring books.  I will also sometimes print out coloring pages for them that pertain to whatever the older boys are studying. 

So here are pictures of each of the boys today - you can tell we homeschool because they aren't dressed to the nines and their hair is all messed up.  But that's part of the beauty of staying at home, isn't it? 

Before we did anything, we stopped to pray together for the grace to get through the day, and we did a devotional from this book I got the boys for New Year's last year.

Overall, it was a good day.  We started at about 8:30am after breakfast and finished a little after 2pm.  We had a 15 minute break around 10am and took about 45 minutes for lunch and "recess."  It's going to be a jam-packed week for us because we had Monday off (Labor Day) and I have appointments on Friday; most everything for this week will have to be packed into just three days.  We worked a little ahead this morning so I think we'll be able to do it.

I see all these pictures of kids going back to school today and I feel so incredibly blessed to be able to have mine home with me.