First Day of Kindergarten

We finished our first day of kindergarten at home after about 2 and a half hours of working today! So, let me jump in and tell you all about it!

Last night:

I barely slept at all. You would have thought it was me, again, getting ready to walk into my first year of high school or something. It was literally that bad. When I got up this morning my chest literally hurt. I have know idea why. It’s not as if I haven’t been “homeschooling” for years on and off. It’s not as if these lesson plans weren’t something I hadn’t already taught.

I knew the material, obviously, I’m an engineer teaching a kindergartner. It was irrational, but yet the first day of school plagued me. (I’ll admit my “public school experience” wasn’t sunshine and rainbows, far from it. The thought of my daughter one day being thrown to those wolves kills me.) Putting all of that behind me, I got up an hour before my daughter putting on makeup and dressing like a teacher, kinda. I put on a bracelet ok?

How we started:

My daughter out on school cloths, she was surprised with a little school gift and cards on her table. That was great. I took some photos of her at her kindergarten desk! Then, she was ready to jump into the videos. I decided to go with Abeka academy. For K5 the start out with the Bible Time lesson. The first video was 25 minutes long.

While my daughter knows about God, and we listen to some Christian music on the radio, I am far from a Bible teacher. I was actually kind of excited about this Christian foundation because we don’t have a church we can go to. While I believe in God, I don’t feel qualified to lead and teach. I always fear I will mess things up and usually do when I try to teach her something about this particular area. This was like her introduction into it.

Except since this is a Christian school, they sang lots of little song she didn’t know. It wasn’t like the ABC’s and days of the week songs.  At first she had tears in her eyes like she was about to cry. The teacher on the video had the kids stand up and sing. So basically after the pledge of allegiance, which as a kindergartner she also doesn’t know. We both just stood their through like two songs…

Because I didn’t know them either…it was kinda a depressing way to start the day. Just this upbeat singing of songs that we didn’t know. So I grabbed her hands, tried to stay positive. And we danced to the songs instead of singing them. From there it was up, down, up down. And this repitition of facts about the Bible. I dug out a note book and we started drawing some of it. I stead of the chanting. The constant repetitive chanting seamed to upset her. Over and over the same questions and the same anwsers. The same thee songs we didn’t know. For 25 minutes. At the end she asked if that class was every day????

Basic Skills:

Ugh, I had hoped that would be a fun foundation, a good start. Next the class was a skills development which was just the basics of how kindergarten was…what the tables were named, how kids in school raise their hands, etc. Etc. My daughter wanted to name our table something. We named our table cheese. Deciding to keep it pretty laid back. We also don’t raise hands or stand in line. Lol but such is life.

She gets tickets throughout the day to spend at her kindergarten store at the end of school. She got a ticket for endurance after these courses.

Phonics:

We then went on to the phonics lesson where we made inchworms (the highlight of her day!) And learned about the letter I big and small for 20 minutes. Repeating the same phrase over and over. I sense we may burn out fast…

Took a break!

We took a break after all that a took photos outside for the first day of school! We had lunch and watched the letter factory on Netflix. Why can’t we just have Netflix kindergarten?

Math class!

For math class I stepped up our game because I knew all they were doing was counting to town and working on numbers 1-3 for 15 minutes in the video. So we got out some giant foam cubes with numbers written on them and threw them. Shouting the numbers they landed on. Then. We would add the cubes together. So, things like 2+5, 3+7, 4+6 etc. She is far ahead of what the kindergarten videos are at. Then we did the video where we counted to three. 1, 2, 3, for 15 minutes…

Desk Mat Review!

To wrap up kindergarten each day with some repetition I wanted to use the desk mat to go over all the letters of the alphabet. We counted to 50, sang the days of the week, identified colors and what they stated with. Then worked on right and left. Later on we will do things like sight words.

So, for a first day of kindergarten, all in all I wasn’t really impressed with the abeka academy program like I had hoped to be. I’m hoping that they were just starting out really slow. The videos were really boring today though.

But as far as a first day, my daughter liked our add ons:

• We had an outdoor photo shoot! Made inch worms!
• Visited our school store!
• Made snow cones!
• Played giant Dice!
• We named our table cheese!

Brie

More Resources:

• All About Signing up for Abeka Academy
• Extras for a successful Kindergarten year!
• Guide to starting up a home daycare!