Snapshot Saturday- Starting School

Well, I missed posting a Foto Friday yesterday because I was busy hauling in our loot from a homeschool sale the previous night.  We scored two student desks and two chairs, in addition to curriculum, readers, math manipulatives, and a nifty clock thingy.  I also purchased an American flag and a Christian flag.

We’ve been doing school in the kitchen, at the dinner table, but I’ve read that it is best to have a designated area for school, so as to not cause confusion with younger children.  So, I was really excited to get the student desks.  They had the kind that we bought, and also had the kind that has the arm that comes up and around to create the table.  I chose not to get those because Sister does a lot with her left hand, including color, and I would hate to get her a right handed desk if she ends up being a true lefty.

I set up their desks and chairs in the basement, and moved their bookshelves to the wall facing their desks.  My computer area is adjacent, so I can work on other stuff when they get old enough to work on school themselves.

I started to sort through their books, while re-shelving them, but ended up only taking the board books out and putting them in a crate.  The rest of the sorting will have to wait, because the kids couldn’t wait to start school with their new desks.

Mister has been working on tracing lines and manuscript letters.  He wanted to do the letter A again, so I printed out a few worksheets that I had made, as well as some I found on a website.  The worksheets are all in PDF format, but I noticed that there was a typo on one of them, so I had to export PDF to Word, correct it, then print.  I’m not saying which worksheet had the typo… wink, wink.

I’ve read that with homeschooling, the ability to switch a PDF to doc format will come in quite handy, especially when it comes to making my own worksheets and realizing later that I have a typo.  I tend to do a lot of my typing at 3 a.m. while everyone else is sleeping, and my caffeine depleted brain cells are a little foggy.  Oops… looks like I let the cat out of the bag on which worksheet it was.

I’ve decided to use Abeka’s curriculum for homeschool, and we will start on that once I finish getting the rest of the books in the Kindergarten set.  I think I have four or six left to go.  In the meantime, I am using the worksheets.  I created an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the one’s I have and the ones I need to get still.  I have most of Kindergarten, as well as parts of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades.

We still have to hang up our flags, and get posters of the pledges, but I think my school area is shaping up nicely.

Can you think of anything I should add to my school area?