Day 1 - Creation, Outer Space & All About Me

Today was our official first day of school at BKS Preparatory School!

B was more excited than anyone about starting school today. She's been ready to have some activities and projects to do. I had their circle rugs set out this morning with their worksheets to start off the day after breakfast. I think she shoveled in her breakfast in less than a minute so she could get started on her coloring page.

I got these circle rugs at Target for $9.99 each. They make a perfect "spot-marker" to teach little ones to stay in their places during our morning group time activities. 

After a color by numbers activity worksheet to start off the morning, we used YouTube on the tv to do our morning group time. I made a playlist to use so it starts and just runs through each of the videos, though I stop it after the Pledge of Allegiance to do our morning prayer and Bible verse. The playlist includes the Pledge, Books of the Bible song, Days of the Week song, Months of the Year song and Count to 100 rap song. B is already familiar with all of these things so she was able to sing a long to a few of them, but K just watched. I know as they hear the song every morning they'll be able to pick up all of the words and learn the skills as they dance around and have some fun. Check out our Morning Group Time playlist!

We are memorizing Genesis 1:1 this week so we used hand motions to help us remember it. K surprised me at how well he did at this. I've never tried teaching him scripture yet and I'm encouraged to see that he'll be able to keep up with us as we memorize verses each week.

Our Bible lesson was Day 1 of the Creation. We read Genesis 1:1-5 in our Adventure Bible and talked about how God created the Day and Night. We will do some Days of Creation crafts later in the week, so we didn't do anything today, but we did go into a dark closet to retell the story in the dark and the kids loved how the light came on when God said, "Let there be light!" We did that part a couple of times.

We are studying outer space this week and I plan to introduce some vocabulary terms to them throughout the week. Today we learned the words outer space, galaxy, Milky Way, sun and moon. We read ME and My Place in Space together and learned about something special about each planet. We discussed the sun and moon, what makes up a galaxy and how long it would take to get to another galaxy. B already had some knowledge of this and K seemed to learn a lot though we almost passed his attention span capacity. This was a cute book to use and we ended by discussing how the same powerful God that made the Earth and outer space loves and takes good care of us too.

After group reading time the kids broke up into different reading activities. B had a handwriting worksheet of the planet names that I made her through HandwritingWorksheets.com while I worked with K through the first lesson of Readwell. We worked on the letter S and learned the word "I" as the lesson taught him how to read using picture words. He did a great job with it considering his age and the fact we've never done learning activities with him before.

K was over school after his reading time and went to play while I let B read through her activity. We are using the A Beka reading program with her.  Today's paper booklet, I Learn to Read Book A, was a little below her reading level as it was mainly three letter words that can be sounded out pretty easily, but it was a good review for us to build upon. I also think it helped boost her confidence a good bit because she knew most of the words and was able to quickly sound out the ones that she didn't know right away. I like that the books are little paperback individual books so she has the satisfaction of reading a book all the way through instead of having to wait until another day to finish it.


After our reading time we had a quick snack to review our lessons this morning.  K was able to remember that our galaxy's name had something to do with milk and B helped him out so they got Milky Way mini bars as a treat.

For Math time today we watched LeapFrog's Math Adventure to the Moon video on Netflix. It was a good middle level video as we counted to 10 together many times throughout the show, but also talked about shapes, patterns and sorting. At one point we counted by 2's, 5's and 10's which was better for B's level.

I found an All About Me activity worksheet on Pinterest and helped the kids complete it. I helped K write his name and then let him answer questions for me but B insisted on writing all of her own words and just asked me to help her spell an occasional word. I resisted the urge many times to correct her letters or spelling, but reminded myself that this was an "All About Me" activity and each of those little "errors" were special parts that I will be able to cherish.

We were done by 11:00 a.m. with some time to play before lunch. At some point I plan to have them go back and draw or write in their composition books about what they learned today since I forgot to do that this morning. Their journals will be a way for them to keep track each day of what they are learning and for us to look back at how far they've come throughout the year.

All in all I think we had a successful first day of school and I am energized by how happy they seem and how much I enjoyed teaching and learning with them.