What a week!

Wow, the first week of our new school year has been something! A combination of new experiences, a new schedule, bittersweet events in the life of our family, and even a virus floating around - all mixed together with the normal busyness of our lives!

We had a lovely (albeit full and tiring) weekend in town before we returned to the whirlwind of this week.

Monday marked not only the first day of our new school year, but also brought the news that my Grandpa, whose health had deteriorated through many years of suffering Parkinson's Disease, was failing quickly. By the evening, he had died - a peaceful death at home, surrounded by family and friends loving him and singing his favorite hymns as he slipped away to Heaven. It was a bittersweet event for Papaya Daddy & I. We are happy that Grandpa is finally strong and well again - however, it is sad to have our last living grandparent die. Today is Grandpa's funeral, and it is a little sad for me not to be there.

Monday also brought the news that Papaya Daddy's mother was ill and in the hospital for tests. We've been thinking & praying for her all week, and are glad to hear that she's feeling better and is probably coming home today.

The Portabella came down with a mild cold last weekend, and passed it on to me this week. The Banana woke up whimpering this morning, then vomited at the breakfast table. She's doing better now, and is keeping food down (and requesting more), but I expect that she has her own version of the current family virus (probably exacerbated this morning by low blood sugar from not eating much yesterday). I'm glad I didn't have much planned for today! Those things I did have planned (mostly fun things like art & music) I'll transfer to tomorrow, since Papaya Daddy works all weekend. Today will be a sick day with videos.

With those three overarching events coloring the week, it was sometimes hard to keep from getting distracted or overly frustrated with the kids when they were noisy or crazy. But we still managed to get a lot done, and (even without doing anything today but watching videos & playing quietly) had a fairly successful first week of our new school year.

Our first day of school began with wrapped presents (of art supplies) for each child. Here's the Banana trying hers out while the Papaya opens his:

The children made good use of their gifts & created some beautiful pictures over the course of the week. Here's the Banana's masterpiece-in-the-making:And here are a couple fun & beautiful pictures the Papaya created: Even the Portabella got a present: a toy drum that makes a pretty sound I don't mind hearing over & over again (the other kids enjoyed her gift, too):I created a new schedule for our new school year, and it seems to be working well for us. It helps that I've started to shower & dress by 7:00 rather than leaving it for later in the morning. If we don't get too distracted, we're usually eating our snack by 10:30 & have some good time left for "fun time" before lunch.

The "Good Attitude" poster I created with hopes of keeping the Papaya on track when he has to do seat work. After he's finished with a seatwork session, we look at the definition of a good attitude & decide together whether he deserves a sticker for his sticker chart. When his sticker chart is full, he'll get to choose a prize out of a fun "prize box" I've put together. Shameless bribery or an appropriate reward for a job well done? I prefer to think of it as the latter. (By the way, Tuesday & Thursday were good attitude days around here this week. Monday & Wednesday - not so good.)For Bible this week, we continued to read through the children's story Bible. We also started learning Bible verses to song with a new CD provided with the Papaya's Core K. There are 26 verses to learn throughout the year, one for each letter of the alphabet. This week, for the letter "A", we learned Romans 3:23 - "All have sinned...". Not exactly a rousing, encouraging verse to begin the new year with! But we had fun singing it together.

The Papaya began many new things in Language Arts this week - Sonlight LA-1, Explode the Code 1 (pictured below), a new "I Can Read It" series from Sonlight, and a new 1st grade handwriting book. He also continued with All About Spelling, learning when to use a "c" and when to use a "k" to spell the sound of "k" at the beginning of a word (using a cool rule that I never knew - I expect I'll learn a lot of new cool rules with this program). He's enjoying the silly stories in "I Can Read It", although the phonetic readings using only the short "a" sound drive me crazy! He was actually reading at a more advanced level at the end of his kindergarten language arts course, but this 1st grade course will progress pretty quickly. I can't wait till they introduce a few more vowels!It was a great week for science. We began Sonlight's Science K, which includes Usborne science books & worksheets they made with one or two questions each day to match each scheduled reading:The program also includes science experiments scheduled each week. I created "lab sheets" to record the experiments (procedure, hypothesis, results, conclusion, and space for a picture or two). Papaya Daddy supervised the experiments on Tuesday, when he was home from work for Veteran's Day. This week's experiments all focused on the fact that air expands when it's heated, and contracts when it gets cold. Both kids had a great time. Here are our notebook pages (you can click on the pictures to see them big):In math, we continued Singapore's unit on adding & subtracting within 20. I was particularly impressed with the Papaya's work on this workbook page, which I thought was pretty challenging:In Core K reading with the Papaya, we began reading Egermeier's Bible together, something we'll continue throughout the next year. We also read very quick overviews of some of the ancient history eras, which we'll continue for the next couple of weeks. I think our favorite era this week was reading the ancient Egyptians. Mummy making was pretty gross! For read-alouds, we started a book called "Hero Tales" about heroes of the Christian faith, and read about Hudson Taylor. Since we were on the China theme, we also read "The Story of Ping", which the kids loved. For some of these readings, we did mapping activities. Some of them also had timeline figures to stick on Sonlight's cool "Book of Time". I'm not sure if the Papaya gets the concept of a timeline yet, but putting stickers on is fun! He'll continue adding to his Book of Time over the next few years. Papaya Daddy is slowly reading through "Little House in the Big Woods" in the evening - he keeps on stopping so we can look up a picture of something unfamiliar (like a butter churn, a fiddle, a beartrap, or a rifle) on the internet. Hooray for Google Images with the safe search feature!

In circle time, we did some more music work (the Papaya's learning some VERY easy little piano pieces), enjoyed some poetry reading out of a couple new books, worked on memorizing Christiana Rosetti's "Who has seen the wind?", and learned a new fingerplay about rain. I thought it would be good preparation for our planned visit to the Seattle area next week!

Another new thing we began this week was the Banana's "special school time". I'm using ideas from Heart of Dakota's "Little Hands to Heaven", a gentle curriculum that uses a Ken Taylor children's Bible as the spine, and weaves in simple, low-prep fingerplays, dramas, music, and fun activities to learn letters and numbers. The Banana is the perfect age for this, and she LOVES it! And she is unbelievably cute putting her hands on her cheeks and doing the other actions as the recites the words to the following fingerplay (to learn the sound of the letter A): "A-A-Adam, can you believe - God made animals, and you and me!" She's picking out A's everywhere now & doing the fingerplay when she sees them. We made an "A" with masking tape on the floor & walked on it, and she glued Cheerios on an A on a piece of paper (and ate a lot). Here she is making the letter "A" with wood pieces from Handwriting Without Tears.
The Portabella turned the magic age of 6 months old this week! Finally, time to begin solids. She got her first real taste of "real" food - infant oatmeal powder mixed with mama's milk. She was very interested in this whole new world, and even managed to swallow some & ask for more. Life will never be the same again. And thus begins the slow, (thankfully, very slow) process of weaning my last child from me - another bittersweet event. Wow, my longest update ever! Here's hoping for a healthy & happy weekend!