Starting The School Year

We officially start the school year today!  I have been a little hesitant to start school this year, but we're going to ease into it, and we do have some fun things to look forward to as well.  I thought I'd share what back-to-school is looking like for us this year.

1. Donuts And Back-To-School Photos.  We have a tradition of starting every school year with fresh donuts for breakfast.  Does it disrupt our first morning?  Yes, it does a bit, since we have to drive 20 minutes to our nearest grocery store, but we often follow it up with a trip to the library, and then back home to hit the books.  My kids have started to look forward to their first-day-of-school donuts.

I also take photos of the kids with a letter board recording their grade on the first day of school.  Even though I don't have social media to share it on this year, you bet I'm still taking the photos for their photo books!

2. Back-To-School Goodie Bags.  Last week I received an email from Rainbow Resource with a suggestion to make back-to-homeschool fun with new school supplies.  And while I do buy new supplies every year, it occurred to me that my kids would love having their own goodie bag with new pencils, erasers, notecards, and notebooks.  So I'm putting together a little brown lunch bag (nothing fancy) with some new things in it, and I think it's going to add a fun element of excitement to our first day!

3. An Easy Start.  Since we will be taking a trip one week into the school year, I've been finding myself dragging my feet when it comes to starting school.  We won't get into a full routine until after we get back, so I'm going to start gently this week with just a few subjects.  We'll introduce our full work load after Labor Day, but for now we will do an extended morning time (I have some of Pam Barnhill's morning time plans that we'll work through), history, and science.  When we return, I'll go back to my more simplified morning time plans (more on that coming this week), and we'll add in all the main subjects (math, language arts, etc).  By the end of the year we are always behind in history and science anyway, so this will give us a head start.

4. Flexible Friday Fun-days.  I fully intend to keep our "Friday Fun Day" routine this year, because my kids loved it so much!  This is a day that we take a break from normal subjects, and do more "extras" like art, cooking, music, etc.  Because of our trip schedule, we will get back to this routine in September.

5. Park Days With Homeschool Friends.  Over the last year I've been attempting to start our own "homeschool social group" by inviting some of our homeschool friends to meet us for regular park days, hikes, and field trips.  It has been going wonderfully!  I have a calendar with meetups scheduled every two weeks or so, and friends pick the ones they can attend.  My kids and I are usually at different parks, and we do our own hikes frequently, so planning in advance when we will do these things hasn't made any huge change to our schedule.  And this way we get friend time in at the same time!  It has turned into a really nice, encouraging group, and I am hoping it is something we can keep doing in the years to come.

6. A Homeschool Support Group At Church.  One big change for us this year is that I am helping to lead a homeschool support group at our church.  We have a lot of families in our church homeschooling for the first time this year, and my pastor's wife wanted to get something going to help encourage those families. We are still hashing out how the group is going to run, but we've had one meeting already and another this week.  It's looking like it will be monthly meetings, which is something I can manage - if we had to go down more often we might run into some of the troubles we had with co-ops.  I am hoping this will be a supportive group for people who are thinking about homeschooling within our church, and I'm excited to see how it all plays out!

These are all the immediate plans that I have for our school year, and we'll see how they change as the months roll on!  As you read this, we are probably enjoying our donuts and breaking out some books to read together.  

As a quick, informal poll, comment and let me know what you most want to hear about on my blog related to homeschooling in the next few weeks!  Here are some options, but I'm open to suggestions.

-Curriculum changes for this year

-Extra-curricular homeschooling goals

-Day in our homeschool life

I have a post coming this week about how we do morning time, including a fun freebie I put together, so stay tuned!