1 day down, 179 (ish) to go...

So that went relatively well, with one notable exception, which we'll get to momentarily.

For reasons unknown, Ari developed a bit of an obsession with getting a backpack this year. I'm not sure if I've mentioned, but my kids are homeschooled and don't need backpacks. But both Staples and OfficeMax came out with deals this week where you can buy backpacks and get all the money back as store credit/gift cards. We can always use office supply store credit for printer cartridges, so they all got new backpacks on Sunday. And because they are giant dorks, they all put them on for the trip into the school room this morning. I appreciated this, because it allowed me to take this dorky back to school picture. I think Milo's backpack was completely empty, Ari's had a couple of pencils in it, and Gus' had some stuffed animals.

We stuck to my fancy schedule remarkably closely. Which means first off we were all together to do a page from Tin Man Press' "Waker Uppers," see how much they remember of the poems they were memorizing in the spring, read a Bible story, and read the poem of the day (which was Poe's "Annabel Lee," so we got to have an age-appropriate discussion of necrophilia. Oddly, my children don't seem to think there's anything particularly weird about sleeping with your dead girlfriend every night. Hmm....). All of this took 30 minutes, though I had an hour scheduled for it. At this point, Dave came back from dropping Gable off at the groomer and picking up chicken biscuits for us, so we took a break for breakfast.

Then Ari went off to work on math, Spanish, logic, and spelling, and to do his independent reading (first up is Tuck Everlasting). While this was going on, Dave did math with Milo and I did reading, math, and handwriting with Gus. What I've learned about Dave and math with kids is that he will expand a math lesson to fill all available time and then some. So they spent 40 minutes doing less than a full lesson in Singapore, but doing it very thoroughly. Then Milo went off to do HIS independent reading. I'd scheduled 30 minutes for this, and was worried that would be too much for him. But I came in to check on him 5 minutes before the timer went off and he could barely look up, so engrossed was he in his book. He made it through around half of Flat Stanley today, which means I'm going to have to find a lot more books to put on his list.

Dave took Gus upstairs to read and play (the real test will happen tomorrow, of course, when Dave will be back at work) while Milo and I did spelling, WWE, and Explode the Code. Then I put Puertas Abiertas on for Milo and Gus while Ari and I worked on MCT and WWE. Writing with Ease was the notable exception to our mostly problem-free day. Ari HATES it with a fiery passion. Hates it, hates it, hates it. Dictation is fine; he has no problem there. He despises narration and, despite years of trying, he's not so good at it. I think he just hates the open-endedness of it; the lack of a single correct answer. I'm kind of not sure what to do. I'm going to have him give outlining a try...I wonder if it might appeal to his systematic little brain more; if it works, I guess I'll let him drop the damn narration. Sigh. Anyway, so after he threw his WWE tantrum and we managed to get past that and get through MCT, we were all done for the morning, half an hour ahead of schedule! Yay schedule that works!

After lunch and a break, we moved on to history. Apparently my attempts over the past two years to make history interesting to my history-phobic kids worked....at least on Ari. He said several times over the past week or so that he was looking forward to history. First I pulled out A Street Through Time, a cool book that shows how a single street has changed from 10,000 BC to the present. Now, I've had this book for at least 3 or 4 years and no one has shown the slightest interest in it before (except me; I think it's awesome).  But today they LOVED it. It was like I'd just given them a new puppy. I could barely get a word in as they oohed and ahhed over this amazing book that's been sitting right in front of them for years. I just noticed when I pulled up the Amazon link that they also have "A City Through Time" and "A Port Through Time." Guess I have my Christmas shopping all taken care of now. We followed this up with the introduction to Story of the World, which was not nearly as big of a hit, but did hold their interest relatively well. We did the review questions from the activity guide, and then they watched a Magic School Bus episode about archaeology. I'm pretty pleased with the history rotation we've sort of stumbled upon. I noticed in the intro to the activity guide that they recommend SOTW 1 for 1st through 4th grade, SOTW 2 for 2nd through 5th, etc. Which means Ari and Milo will both be right in the recommend range all the way through and I'll only be shoving Gus ahead by one year. I'm glad we did the 2 year American history thing before this; I think Ari would have been bored to tears with SOTW 3 and 4, and he certainly wouldn't have wanted to go through it AGAIN for the next go round.

We finished up the day with piano lessons all around (from Dave, who can fill up any amount of time playing piano with kids as well). Gus is only doing piano because he does everything his big brothers do, but he seems to be doing really well with it. And Dave was very impressed with how quickly Milo's picking it up, too (he's played around with teaching Milo a little before, but this will be the first time he's done it regularly).

And then we went out for ice cream and let the kids eat giant sundaes with 3 scoops of ice cream. Because it's the first day of school!