First Day of School!

Today was our first "official" day of school, we don'tusually start until after Labor Day, but we felt we needed a little jump start on history which is why we did the Great Courses DVD last week.
HISTORY - We started off our first day by reading the fable of Androcles and the Lion.
Then we went downstairs to watch the next Great Courses DVD which was about the Fall of Rome. I didn't make a cool tally sheet this time, but Christine made copies of Celtic coloring pages such as their homes, clothing and a difficult dot to dot of some of their patterns. Beryl Brame made her own tally sheet, (proving that she really enjoyed the previous week's activities) while the other kids colored. The video was great. This time Mr. Thompson was dressed up as a Germanic Barbarian and told some great stories. We especially liked the one about the Huns tenderizing their meat by putting it under their thighs on their saddles as they rode horseback. The joke was that if we walked into a hamburger joint today we would much prefer to eat a hamburger than a bun burger, one that was warmed up by Huns sitting on our burger for us. We also learned that Attila the Hun died from choking on his own blood after breaking his nose by walking into a tent pole on his wedding night. Silly Hun. We also read an Irish tale called Finn MacCoul about the salmon of knowledge, I think we need to eat more salmon.
SCRIPTURES - After the video we came upstairs and read about Barbarians in the Bible Dictionary and in Acts 28 where Paul, after having survived a shipwreck was bitten by a snake and surprised the Barbarians by not being harmed. We learned that Barbarian just means strangers and that the term was given to any group of people who were not your neighbors. We also learned that many of the Barbarians did not intend on coming in and destroying the Roman Empire, but the Roman Empire may have been ripe for destruction because of their wickedness.
"Had every Roman father been teaching his sons righteousness instead of war, and every mother making a home for her children, had all parents assembled their children in their homes instead of the circuses and public baths, had they taught them chastity and honor and integrity and cleanness; would Rome still be a world power? Certainly it was not the barbarians from the north but the insidious moral termites within that destroyed the Roman world empire." Spencer W. Kimball
Jared and Beryl also did a little game from The Friend called Odd One Out about different groups of people while the younger girls did a dot to dot outlining the Roman Empire, finding out that the Mediterranean Sea looks like a flying duck and Italy of course looks like a boot.
MATH - Next, we started our new math books, The Life of Fred. Jared and Beryl read their chapter from Fractions with Christine and learned about greater than and less than. For example Fred is 5 1/2 yrs. old which is great than 5. I worked with the younger girls in Apple and we learned about adding 2 to 5 makes 7. We looked at a clock and set 5 o'clock and 7 o'clock. We used three rulers to measure how tall Fred is, he is 3 ft. tall. We also learned 3+4=7 with pencils and all the other addition factors of 7. We also talked about Calendars, Days of the Week, Months of the year and watch Youtube videos of both.
SPELLING - After lunch (and the Brames going home), I gave the kids their first spelling pre-tests. Jared's 6th grade list is difficult, but he's hanging in there. Clarissa practiced her cursive with her spelling words. Amber used All About Spelling's letter tiles to practice remembering the names of the letters.
VOCAB - Jared worked on learning some new vocabulary from Vocabulary Cartoons.
GEOGRAPHY - He also learned state capitals from The Little Man in the Map Teaches State Capitals; Montgomery, Alabama to be exact.
READING - I had the girls read Dolch sight word cards for the Pre-Primer level. They both did really well. There are 40 words and they knew most of them. Jared and I took turns reading aloud the first few chapter of Beowulf (he can read with a cool accent:).
WRITING - For writing, they each wrote in their journals.
TUTORING - At 2:30 we had to stop to take Clarissa to her first day of Tutoring at Dublin Elementary with Miss Stone, we listened to a Math CD on the way. She loved it, the tutoring. She learned about the word SAW and when she got home she read the little book that Miss Stone sent home.
CRAFT - Finally, we made a snack of pretzel crayons, pretzels dipped in candy melt with crayon papers over them, the kids loved them!
First day of school, SUCCESS!