Our first week of first grade has gone really well. We've managed to be up and ready and starting on time each morning. C is enjoying working in his spelling workbook (Spelling Workout Level A) everyday. So far, it's like all the pre-K and kindergarten activity books he's always loved.

He really enjoys science, too. We're following the guidelines in The Well-Trained Mind and studying animals, the human body, and plants this year. He chose lizards as his first animal to study, so we spent a lot of time on Monday and Wednesday reading about reptiles, lizards in general, and more specific lizards like Komodo dragons (his favorite), chameleons (my favorite), iguanas, etc. We'll make a trip to the zoo in a few weeks and spend some time watching lizards, snakes, alligators, and turtles. Maybe by then it won't be in the 100's every day!

C hasn't shown too much interest in history (The Story of the World, Ancient Times) yet. I think part of the reason is that J (3 1/2) comes in bored from computer games and toys and starts trying to distract him. We're doing a fun project for our introductory chapter - sort of like a timeline of C's life, his own personal history. He helped me pick out 3-4 pictures of each year of his life, then I downloaded them to Walmart.com for printing. We picked them up Monday and started working on his timeline pages Tuesday. We did ages 0-2 on Tuesday, 3-4 yesterday, and will finish with 5-6 today. I hole-punched the pages we completed and put them in his notebook. He's eager to show them to his grandparents when they come next weekend. I think he'll start to enjoy history more next week when we start talking about early people and not just what history is in general.

As for math, C enjoys it at times and not at others. We're continuing with the Saxon math series. We completed Math 1 last year without any problems, so we're going ahead with Math 2 this year. (Did I mention that in my last post? It's hard to remember sometimes...) Today will be his first timed math fact worksheet, and I'm not expecting it to go well. He'll have one minute to correctly answer as many doubles addition facts as he can. He's a perfectionist, for one thing. He won't be happy if he has to leave any unanswered. He's also a dawdler on these worksheets. He's bored with them and finds any excuse he can to try to get out of them. I remind him that he's only making his time with them longer, but that doesn't seem to matter. I ended up setting a timer for him last year, but this year will be different because he'll have only one minute. We'll see...

I haven't started his music yet. I wanted to wait until we were further into the school year and had a set schedule. We'll be moving from our apartment into a rent house next weekend, so that whole week will be a break from school. Once we get back into the routine, my bi-weekly Bible study group will get started up, then our little homeschool co-op will get underway. (More on that later.)

Well, it's time to get the boys up and begin our day... I'm not looking forward to the timed test this morning. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised!