First Week

This week:
I repeatedly had to answer "So when do you start school?"
I finished Monkey1's first day of school dress.
I packed the first day of school lunch the night before, without using peanut butter.
Our first day of Classical Conversations -- Monkey1's first day of kindergarten!
I met with four other homeschooling moms over a pile of curriculum books, passing cheese and crackers and wine.

"So when do you start school?"
Everyone that asked knew we are homeschooling Kindergarten. To my conventional schooling friends I said, "Oh we already did. We started Phonics in July and Math last week." But to my homeschooling friends, who all seemed to plan starting right after Labor Day, I said, "We start Classical Conversations this week."

Really, I find the idea of "starting" homeschooling comical. After all, didn't we start reading when they started recognizing the first letter of their names? Didn't we start math when my husband showed them how to count on their fingers? Didn't we start handwriting when I let them start scribbling and telling me the stories? I definitely was around plenty of unschooler homeschool preschool parents during those beginning years to think so!

The Dress
The first day of school dress was finished and ironed and hung up ready for early morning eyes to light upon. That's probably the only time the dress will be ironed too. (Pictures here.)

Lunch
Classical Conversations meets in the morning, and then everyone stays for lunch and playtime, leaving at 1:00 when the bigger kids go back inside for more class time. Because preschool has not started yet, Monkey2 would be with us for Monkey1's first day of Kindergarten. Three lunches. I already had been warned that one child participating in Classical Conversations had a peanut allergy, so I had to think about how to avoid peanut butter and jelly.
For Monkey1: two mini-bagels, cream cheese, sliced ham, carrots, and an apple.
For Monkey2: one mini-bagel, mini Babybel cheese, sliced ham, carrots, and sweet pickles.
For Mom: chili to warm up in the microwave, and an apple.
I'm glad I packed/wrapped things up the night before because Monkey2 tried to sleep late again. Just getting her up and making sure she ate breakfast and got dressed was enough to keep track of, in addition to the antsy Monkey1.

First Day!
We had already met with our Classical Conversations community, eight families, approximately 14 children (not sure, they don't sit still much), twice for meetings and once for a Pasta Night. So the place and the people were not all strange and intimidating.

We started the day with the Pledge of Allegiance. This was a little tearful for me. Patriotism is so complicated these days. Also, I probably have not said the Pledge of Allegiance since I graduated from school. At the end, I had to bite my mouth closed to keep an "Amen" from escaping. Eleven years of Catholic school, and inevitably half the time someone would put an Amen on the end of the Pledge, either absent-mindedly reverent or on purpose to see if the teacher was paying attention. Meanwhile, my Monkeys were perplexed by the words; they had never heard the Pledge of Allegiance before.

Then, to our classrooms. The eight five-year-olds grouped around a table, eyes on their Tutor, with much squirming. First came the "memory work" that we will be drilling (or simply playing and re-playing our copy of the Memory Work CD in the car) this week: the Timeline events, the history sentence, the Latin conjugation, the science fact, the geography places, the English grammar, and the math work. Remember, Classical Conversations operates on a classical model of education, so at this age filling the little minds up with memorization work is the first item on the agenda. Explaining it can come later (at home or in a few years when the three-year curriculum cycle repeats again).

I won't write this out every week, but here's where we started:
Timeline: Creation, Fall in the Garden, Cain and Able, the Flood, the Tower of Babble, the Unification of Upper and Lower Egypt by Pharaoh Menes, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the First Intermediate Period in Egypt.
These eight events were presented on individual large cards with illustrations and a short explanation on the back. The Tutor has a lovely lilting southern accent, and already I'm hearing it back from my Monkeys! At home we reviewed the Timeline cards, and then Monkey1 hauled out our Children's Bible, and we read the first stories again.

History Sentence: Tell me about Charlemagne. In 800 A.D., during the medieval period, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor of Europe.
There was tune for this.

Latin, conjugation of the verb amo.
This is sung to some Protestant children's hymn, which I am not familiar with, so I stumble over it. Monkey2 started singing it on the potty the other day, so I know she's got it down already.

Science: What are seven types of biomes? Seven types of biomes are grasslands, dessert , scrub lands, tundra, deciduous forests, coniferous forests, and tropical rain forests.
There were finger/arm motions with this to help us remember. I had never heard the word "biome" until I came across Classical Conversations, and then recently in the library I saw a group of books, looking like a set of encyclopedias, titles Biomes. Mom gets to learn stuff too!

Geography: European waters: North Sea, Baltic Sea, Adriatic Sea, English Channel, Mediterranean Sea.
To introduce this, the Tutor had several maps for each child's lap. The first map was the whole world, the second was Europe. This moved us from the big picture to the more specific area. Monkey1 promptly marked Russia with an X, noting that Anastasia lived there; this daughter of the last czar is the favorite history character of the moment.

English Grammar: The eight parts of speech are nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, adjectives.

Math: Count 1 to 12. Skip counting by 2's, 2 through 24.

The Tutor was constantly addressing the wiggle situation by having the kids stand up and do hand/arm motions to the memorization work. She did some kind "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" routine for the English Grammar, which I largely missed because I had to take Monkey2 to the bathroom.
There was a snack time, and "Presentations" or Show-and-Tell. We had our cricket, which we had caught in our yard a few weeks ago. My mother had sent us a cricket cage and cricket food. To my great relief, not one of the other Moms said, "ew, a bug!" and a few were very interested in where to get cricket supplies.
We went outside for science, which was a temperature experiment, setting a thermometer in the sun and another in the shade, and an introduction to "orbit" since this year will largely be astronomy.
Art was paper and pens ("Pens," said the Tutor, "because there are no mistakes. You just make it into art.") and a review of shapes -- dots, straight lines, curvy lines, sharp corners, etc -- and then a little free time to draw something using all of those. Monkey1 drew a remarkable version of Ponyo, a little gold fish (or tadpole?) in a Japanese anime movie we watched a month ago.
Last there was "review time" which covered the memorization work introduced that morning, but in coming weeks will cover previously introduced material. The Tutor had a beach ball the kids tossed to each other, with subject words on it (Timeline, history, Latin, science, geography, English, math). Whatever word a child's left hand was touching was the subject they would review before tossing it again. As could be expected with a group of five-year-olds, this bordered on crazy.

Then lunchtime! And recess! The kids played for an hour outside. While there was a ball to kick around, mostly they passed the time exploring behind the bushes and chasing each other with sticks.

The Tutor asked us mothers how we thought the day went. I think I remember her saying she's been doing Classical Conversations for a year or two, but this is her first year as a Tutor.
"Great! I'm so glad we are doing this for Kindergarten!" I told her, noting that a half day in a classroom was plenty, and complimenting her on keeping the children engaged and focused on the material she was presenting.

Hours later, I asked Monkey1 what her favorite part of the day had been.
"Recess!" she answered.
"Do you want to go again next week?" I asked, though I knew the answer.
Vigorously she nodded yes.

Curriculum, Cheese and Crackers and Wine
On Friday night I sat down at the school work table of a fellow homeschooling mom along with three other women in my parish. The hostess has a ten-year-old, eight-year-old, and a six-year-old; she sent the oldest to one year of school before she started homeschooling. The others have children: 9, 7, 5 and 2 (sent the oldest to kindergarten, and then started homeschooling for first grade; this year to homeschool three); 7, 3, and 1 (skipped the kindergarten experience/experiment and went straight to homeschooling); 5, 4, 2, and 8 months (first year homeschooling). I have ages 5 and 3.
The inevitable "when are you starting?" question went around, and I had to laugh because of the group of us, only I had started, and I was the one who had not planned on homeschooling this year!

The more experienced shared the flow of their days, we examined each other's math materials, talked about history story books, looked at the copy work of the oldest children, and shared our art project attempts and plans. We talked about our responses to the socialization question and discussed extended family opposition to homeschooling. One mother confessed that she was tired of the reactions when she says she homeschools, so from now on she's going to say, "My children have a private tutor. She graduated in the top of her college class with two degrees. She worked in politics for awhile, but she just loves kids... it's working great for us." This describes herself of course!

The evening flew by, and too soon it seemed we were tiptoeing back to our cars, cell phones to ears to check on husbands and sleeping children.