Georges First Day!

Today was George's first day! Monday's are always a little rushed in the mornings due to speech therapy. Once we got home and had a little down time, and gave me a few minutes to be sure I was prepared, we started the day. At 11:10am, I announced to George it was time to start school, of course I did this 5 minutes early just so I could grab a few pictures of my baby starting his first day!

Very Excited to start finally!

I am so glad I did this one! It's perfect, and I plan to do this every year whether is home schooled or attending public school, he will always know what year it was.

First we got his box that has glue, crayons, scissors, and a ruler. He sat down so mesmerized looking at it. Directly following this we sat down together on the floor and I read "Amelia Bedelia's First Day of School" Following the story we did a 5 question and answer sheet together.

Then I gave him a sheet with 6 pages (mixed up) and he had to cut them out and correctly put them in order. With some help from looking back in the book he successfully did it.

In the story Amelia Bedelia makes Daisy's out of paper, so of course that was a great simple craft to go along with the story.

Then we made one that had colorful petals

After this is was almost lunch time and I needed to tend to some laundry so I brought out the file folder game I told you about here "dress the bear" George had a blast and made all sorts of outfits, and mismatched them.

This gave me a few minutes to fold a load of laundry and throw the next in the dryer. At this time is was 12:30pm, time for lunch. So we cleaned up and went downstairs. We came back up at 1:45, and it was time to start in on the assessment.

I decided the best way to watch Georges progress was through a simple assessment we will do three times, at the beginning of the year, middle of the year and again at the end. Sadly the first time around most of it (80%) he found very frustrating because he just didn't get it very well, but he tried and I am proud of him for that. I am sure it's not easy to try to do a task when you have no clue what is being asked. He stuck with it though. One thing he really loved was BINGO

We used this for the color/shapes part of the assessment and he just blew right threw it. So proud of my little man! After this we started the actual lesson for the day which was the letter Aa, and number 0. He knows the Aa, so that was pretty quick. he struggled a little with the lowercase today but I think that was more of him just needed a break because we had been going for over an hour and a half at that point. But again he stuck it out and finished every task I threw at him.

After we finished that I decided today is done. It was 3:45 I moved the last part of the lesson plan (a color review) to another day. We cleaned everything up and called it a day. Our first day was great. I really believe this year is going to be a good one. I just pray god gives me the patience I need to do this. One thing I learned today is don't expect the pace to be anything. The Amelia Bedelia lesson plan took us an hour, I thought it would take 30minutes tops, and the assessment I thought would take 2 hours and it only took around one. I also am going to need to stop more than just once for lunch. It's a lot to ask a kindergartner to sit still for 2 hours like that. Included lunch our day lasted 4.5hours, actual classroom time was 3hours 15minutes. If he where in a public kindergarten it would have been 3 hours, so we spent more time in class.  So that was our first day. I just wanted to share with everyone! Now to be sure I am ready for the rest of the week!