These pics were of the first day of school. And yes, Grace is still in her night gown. One of the many advantages we found this week at our one room schoolhouse. Grace getting to sleep in as late as she needs to is a very big deal.
Brian seems to think that Grace is about right on track in some areas and definitely more skilled in others. He expects that with some of her subjects he will be able to start the 1st grade curriculum right after Christmas.
We have found a couple of school subjects that Grace hates. She does not like to color. She never has and we used to get nearly blank coloring sheets every week from her pre-k class and every Sunday from church. She also does not like to practice writing her letters. She just doesn't have much patience for monotonous tasks. I don't really blame her, neither does her Mama. She does love her math lessons and her geography map puzzles. She's gaining confidence in her reading skills and she's gaining more and more sight words everyday. It's early, but it really feels like we made the right call.
Before we started school we decided to do a small renovation to our kitchen to make a real "classroom" space for our Wood Family School. If you've been in our house (or most houses in our subdivision) you might have noticed the completely useless window seat/breakfast nook. Ours was used as a shelf to hold cookbooks and other small messes. So we turned it into a counter space. Everyone chipped in to help. JoJo sawed the lumber (just kidding), Grace and Haven primed the wood for me. We painted the surface with chalkboard paint. The chairs were leftovers from our garage sale and they are a perfect fit. It doesn't feel like we lost much room in our kitchen and it provides that special place that is just for school. The pics below show our renovation in progress. It was a really great do-it-yourself project: no one got hurt, Brian didn't yell at me or make me cry, the whole thing was finished in one weekend, and it doesn't appear to be something that will drastically lower the value of our house!
I'll keep you posted from time to time on how school is progressing and as we get a bit farther into the process I'll have Brian write a post on the pros and cons of the curriculum we are using. We know there are bound to be bumps in the road, but from my point of view it's been "so far so good"!!!
