School time

Last Friday was the first day of Public School that my children have ever had. (Excepting McKay who did go to kindergarten and half of first grade.) A Charter school in our area created a Friday school day for homeschoolers and we decided to take part. So, every Friday my children will be going to school. They had a blast. That morning my girls woke up at 5 AM because they were so excited. They don't even do that on Christmas morning. My children are very heavy sleepers. The school day consists of various one hour classes that they sign up for and is actually totally seperate from the full time students who attend. McKay is in 5 classes. They are Math Motivation, Art, Language Arts, Basketball/Volleyball, and Technology. The math motivation class goes along with ALEKS math, which is an online virtual math program which he will be doing at home, and every Friday they will do fun math activities. He says it is a lot of fun but he loves the basketball/volleyball class the best, and he's so excited about the Technology class. Elena is taking 3 classes which consist of Art, Science Lab, and Children's Theater. She is most excited about children's theater as we have been to a few plays and she has been begging me to let her be in a play. She is extremely shy though, so we will see how it goes. Alexia is taking 2 classes this year. They are storytelling and Arts/Crafts/Math fun. The storytelling teacher is the same as the children's theater teacher and she is fabulous.

I think this will be a great experience as they will get to try many subjects, spend some time apart ( a big plus), and get someone besides mom teaching them for a change. These classes are free, because of going through the public school system, and that is great. I know I choose to homeschool, but homeschoolers still have to pay all the same taxes that public schoolers pay, yet we have to pay for everything ourselves, so it is so nice to get a few tax benefits also now and then.

We are still doing culture studies with some other families (see my first post) once a week. We are starting again Sep 3 and our first country of study will be Sweden, which my family is in charge of for the whole month of September, so hopefully baby boy will stay baking in the oven until October. My guess date is the 6th of October, and I have always delivered really close to the due date so we will see what happens. Still that's cutting it pretty close. I'm very excited about this school year and hope to be able to handle it all.