First week of our school year!

I have no cheeky pictures with my kids all dressed up with back packs and standing waiting for a bus, or piled into a carpool... Our week was not filled with new routines, new set ups - but more a gentle flow of questions, answers, explorations and fun!

Aurora is working on writing. She is very motivated to learn to write like her older sister. She has several work books and focuses very hard on writing. I love seeing her dedication and internal motivation!

We started last week with a trip to the library. The library offers our children wonder, knowledge of anything and everything. And sure enough - they came home and read for a long time!!

As part of our goals before the end of the year - we want to have our kids know the seasons and the months of the year. Mostly Daunika, but Aurora really loves singing along with us and I firmly believe you teach to the older and the younger kids WILL learn right along with them!

Daunika understands that the days fit into months, and she understands there are 7 days of the week before the week restarts - but she was trying to figure out what a year was, how one month moved to another. So, together we made some Month tags on the wall and when it's visual as a reminder it seems to help so much. To help cement the concept - we made a Family Timeline together!!

This was a great project because the girls got to cut, glue, choose colors, hang up things on the wall, and recognize the different things in life they understood about our family.

First the girls got to make the year markers along the timeline. It was great for them to See all the years their parents have been together. Our family started with Damon and myself. So - our timeline starts in 2000.

Then the kids created tags of life events - these included things like "Mom and Dad met each other" "Mommy and Daddy got married!" "Our cat was adopted" "________ was born!"... etc. They loved this project!

And our finished Friday project was beautiful. It makes me smile every time I walk by it and I cannot tell you how amazing its been to teach Daunika how the months rotate just like the days of the week - and each full rotation moves us to the next year! FABULOUS!

I hope your beginning school year week goes as fantastic as ours did!!