Beginning again

Tomorrow is our official first day of "school" for our kindergartner and our toddler tagging along.  Of course, this is completely arbitrary, but since she is seeing a lot of her friends heading off to the first day of school and getting a little jealous of the resulting fuss, we decided to make her day special too.  We had a special dinner this weekend, complete with kid-made cupcakes-and will do a first day of school picture tomorrow morning.  So many cute ideas on pinterest for back to school!  I love the chalkboard with the date, grade, and what they want to be when they grow up-what a great memory!

We are using Five in a Row as our main curriculum this year.  I am an unschooler at heart, but need a little bit of structure or we tend to do a downward slide into getting crabby and tired and hearing lots of whining, so this relaxed, literature-based program is our compromise!  We have also been doing Explode the Code for phonics and Right Start Math for...math :) I have big plans to incorporate Spanish this year too. 

I so love to look at my beautifully organized spreadsheets and binders, review my daily plans for the week, and admire the stack of books I ordered from the library ahead of time to complement the week's topics.  Because I know-KNOW-that in a few short weeks, this will be out the window!  I am sure we will still get ideas from the curriculum, but I will be so shocked if we are following it this closely come mid-year.  But I could be wrong-this is what happened last year when I tried to plan everything out, but honestly we didn't have enough to keep us occupied academically, so perhaps this year will be better.  She seems to thrive on structure and routine, but also needs lots of open play time (she's an introvert like her mama!).  So, basically I need to structure lots of unstructured time into our schedule! 

I'll update on how this first week goes-we are reading the Story of Ping and doing lots of activities about Chinese culture, with maybe a quick trip to Chinatown or at least a Chinese restaurant (random side-note: I cannot, for the life of me, spell the word restaurant correctly.  I have to look it up every time.  This is one a few words that constantly trip me up!)

I hope everyone is enjoying this slow edging towards autumn..I adore summer, but find myself looking forward to those crisp, cool days as we enter the new season.