We began homeschooling on Monday and it was.... well, first of all, we don't even have all our supplies yet. So many people are turning to homeschooling that most of the textbooks and curriculum we ordered still aren't here yet. So that presented the first challenge. Second, we had just returned from an amazing Lake Powell trip with Andy getting some kind of stomach virus, so the entire weekend felt like a slap in the face with vacation withdrawals and a sick husband who couldn't do anything. Not quite how I had planned the days leading up to our first day of homeschooling, but oh well. Sometimes you just gotta roll with the punches you're given, right?
I had gotten some advice from experienced homeschoolers to "unschool" my kids a little bit, but given my own upbringing, I couldn't bring myself to completely "unschool" them. We halted the zoom Chinese meetings I had been running with their peers twice a week all summer, and we did less rigid math worksheets each day. But I wanted to really wanted to give my kids a fun first day experience and a learning environment that was conducive to my sanity - so organized and put away when we weren't doing it (since the dining room is essentially our schoolroom). I made some last minute trips to Walmart and Target on the hunt for some storage and cute room decor. I ended up moving some boards around the house so we had a "white board" to learn on, and repurposed some of our existing storage to create school supplies easily accessible. I even made a "Phillips Classroom 2020" list of rules for the kids to go over the first day. But we hadn't finalized when piano lessons would be. And I hadn't figured out if teaching the kids the same subject across all three kids would work better than having them do different subjects. And I certainly hadn't figured out what Cooper was going to be doing while the big kids were in school. So my mind was a little bit of a hot mess, trying to calculate and plan, and figure out everything.
We started out the first day by taking photos of everyone with their "first day of school" signs. Cooper is actually the only one going into school twice a week, but he doesn't start until September, but as always, he wanted to be included, and he couldn't wait for his turn. This quality would become very useful throughout the day. As we started out, Dagny started demanding to learn addition. In her mind, she was ready for first grade math. I had plans for her to work on writing her numbers correctly, but according to her, she already knew how and was ready to do addition! Not quite what I had expected. Meanwhile, Jordan and Bubba were loving the online writing game I had subscribed to, and Cooper was busy going over some Mickey flashcards I got on clearance at Target. He asked me when everyone was going to school, and when I told him this was school, he gave me a scoff, laughed, and said, "this isn't school Mom!" and it cracked me up. He definitely has an idea of what school is, he was expecting us to take everyone to school, and he was happily disappointed as he got his siblings to play with all day. I went over some math with Jordan and Bubba, and Dagny and Cooper ended up playing with some of our learning puzzles nearby. It was all feeling good. But then we got to Chinese, and I realized holy smokes, there is a lot I have to teach. In order to fully get our kids immersed in the Chinese language, not only do they have to understand the characters, they have to know how to use it in a sentence, and then write it, but not just write it, but in the correct stroke order. Chinese is a very difficult language! I'm starting to appreciate my own Chinese education a lot more than ever before.
Andy's cousin is also currently homeschooling so the kids got to have a fun playdate with her kids in the afternoon. We went for our annual ice cream on the first day of school tradition, and the kids all said they had a great day.
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