By Janny Jackson
Disclaimer: I only recommend products I would use myself and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that I may earn a small commission from, at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. You may read my full disclaimer here.
We made it through our first day of school for the 2024-2025 school year and I honestly could not have asked for a better start to the year! It went incredibly smoothly, despite my having to introduce a lot of new curriculums, and do preschool pick up and drop off in between. Attitudes were great and there were only minor complaints towards the end of the day. I am extremely encouraged and pray that as the year continues, we have more good days than bad and can be as productive everyday as we were today!
Here’s a walk-through of how our first day went.
Last night before putting the kids to bed (risky I know) I set the table and put out first day of school gifts for my big kids. They each took pictures with their first day signs this morning. They were both pleasantly surprised with their gifts. The Lego sets were good incentives to finish the day strong so they could dive into them.
How cute is this setup! My son is the Lego fanatic, but my daughter loved that this was her (official) first set that belongs just to her. The stuffed animals are called Warmies and can be warmed up in the microwave. The popcorn and bubble gum scratch and sniff snickers smell exactly as you would imagine. So fun!
While I went to drop off my preschooler I left my big kids working on their independent work which included handwriting, a spelling and word study workbook, and for my third grader a nonfiction reading workbook. My son completed his math lesson for the day by himself as well.
Once that was completed, I put World Watch News on while I made a cup of coffee.
After that I read over our manner of the week, and then read our letter from Writings for the Wild about bull sharks. They both really enjoyed the letter, then did a draw with me, drawing their own bull shark.
We did our bible lesson for the day, then listened to skip counting songs on Youtube. We will listen to these every day until we have mastered them, one number a week.
One thing that I struggled with last year was the constant fidgeting and moving around. I specifically purchased a variety of fidgets to use only for when we were doing school and it worked tremendously well. My son is the wiggle worm-these bubble poppers kept him plenty busy during read alouds or when he wasn’t doing anything specific at the moment.
Then we moved into All About Spelling with review and a game.
I am very adamant about making sure I work individually with each one of my children to make sure they get the individual time and attention they need. They alternate days for who goes first for the day. Today was my son’s turn to go first so while I worked with him, I set my daughter up to work on her online class. These are the bluetooth headphones I purchased for my kids during a sale, and they are perfect.
I don’t wait until our school day is over to check work, ain’t nobody got time for that. I do it during school so that if there are mistakes, they can be corrected and done with, and we are ready to start a new lesson the next day.
My wiggle worm does not sit the entire time he is working, which is totally fine with me. Here he’s working on his language arts…
..while my daughter started working on her Lego set.
Then he moved onto his social studies.
He used an atlas of the United States to work on labeling regions, which is familiar to us, having done Beautiful Feet Geography last year.
I forgot to get pictures of my daughter and her individual subjects, but together we worked on her math, world regions, and literature.
To see what my third grader is using this year, click here. To see what my fifth grader is using this year, click here. To see the curriculum I added or changed last minute, that’s here.
I am so impressed with these two and how well they handled our first day back to homeschool. I made sure to let them know how proud I was of them. It’s a great feeling to be able to knock off everything on the list and feel accomplished at the end of our school day. We managed to finish at a decent time too!
Thanks for coming along with us on our first day of school! Have you started yet? I would love to know how your first day went. As always, thanks for being here!