The first week of our ninth year is homeschooling is complete!

I wanted this to be a special first week of school. I’m still not sure what we’re going to do for Turkey and Bunny when they start high school next year, so I wanted to make sure this year’s first day was memorable, just in case it’s their last year of homeschooling. So we got started with some of our main subjects, including religion, math, language arts, our first read-aloud, and science, but we also had a lot of fun!

We started on Monday with our traditional first day of school celebration. They received all of their workbooks for the new school year, took a look through some of the books we’ll be using, opened their schultüte, and built a new Lego Architecture set. Chickadee was especially excited to have her very own workbook, which she wanted to get started on immediately! The only real work we did that day was math, spelling, and vocabulary, and we began reading The Iliad.

Tuesday and Wednesday we added in more subjects, including Lutheranism 101, our new church-year commemoration study using Celebrating the Saints, writing, and science: physical science for Turkey and Bunny, and zoology (focusing on swimming creatures) for Ladybug.

Yesterday, we had our first field trip of the year…we visited the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Missouri History Museum. While at the garden, we had a nice walk, and we also visited the new Brookings Exploration Center, where the girls got to make nature masks (Turkey is too cool for such things these days, I guess!). At the History Museum, we visited “Little Black Dress: From Mourning to Night” one more time before it closes, and took another walk through “Route 66: Main Street Through Saint Louis.” We also managed to sneak in math and language arts, but not much else, because we were out almost all day!

Today we got back to work, but I made sure we were done shortly after lunch, so we could watch The Young Victoria. Our history studies this year will begin around the Victorian Era, so I thought it would be a good way to familiarize ourselves with the time period, and and have a pleasant end to our first week of school!

Next week, we’ll be adding in our history and literature studies…two of my favorite subjects!