First day of school 2018/2019

Ready or not, the school year began on August 20, 2018. 

The kids had grown so much in the last year. Noah is very nearly as tall as me and I'm five foot eight inches.

Some silly photos are fun. 

Sillies.

Very silly.

Noah is 13 years old and in the eighth grade.

This was the best silly photo he could manage. I guess he's growing up!

Evie is ten years old and in the fifth grade.

Shucks!

Samuel is seven years old and in the second grade.

Check out that tongue. 

Ezra is five years old and beginning Kindergarten finally. 

He's so cute.

Mom is 36 and beginning her tenth year of homeschooling! I checked back in the blog and discovered that yes, I had made one particular post when I first started doing some relaxed preschool with Noah when he was three in 2008. It is staggering to realize that it's been that long. The following year we decided that we were definitely going to homeschool and I ordered my first curriculum from Sonlight. There was an overabundance of material so I ended up using for two years since I decided to hold Noah back. When we moved back to Rapid I decided to move him ahead again. The rest is history I guess. 

Aren't my zinnias amazing this summer?!

Luna will be two years old in October. This first day of school reminds me of when we first got her in January of 2017 and had to figure out how to keep doing school with an un-housetrained puppy locked up. 

Trouncer turned one in May and will have been with us a year coming up on September 17th on my birthday. 

Yes I love my flowers. I wish they were around for longer than three months...or less. 😫😭

One more on the deck in front of the morning glories. 

 

We went inside and got straight to work. Math first for Noah (from a Math-U-See DVD). 

Evie and Noah are doing a writing Composition program together. Here Evie was retelling the fable they were going to re-write. She's very dramatic. 😂

Samuel has been a struggling reader for the last two years so I was curious how he'd do after a whole summer off. For the last three months he did spend a lot of time hanging out in the living room just "reading" books. I sort of thought he was just looking at pictures, but he was puzzling over the words and really trying to read them. Imagine my surprise when I opened our Reading book to begin our first lesson and he had progressed far and away beyond my wildest hopes! Apparently he figured it out. He really is doing fantastic. He can do better than even in this video where he was reading a word problem. 

Here's Noah huge stack of books and Evie's smaller one.

The littles' stuff.

Here's everyone's school book list I had made a few weeks prior and the calendars I use to keep track of everything they do. Here we go!

That evening, which was a Monday, was Ninja Warrior night. Terry had bought the kids two little balls to hang from on their own little ninja course so we had to spend some time outside before the show. The boys also played out there during commercials. 

This was Ezra's first attempt on the balls and he fell pretty hard. Poor little guy. But it didn't keep him down.

Samuel's turn.

Mao Mao came over for a visit. 

Noah likes to hold Trouncer like this. 

Ninja time.

This was school the following morning, which we had to cut short due to a dentist appointment. 

Noah doing school in the dentist office. 

Samuel waiting for his turn. We actually didn't get a whole lot done that first week. We had dentist and orthodontist appointments, a trip to the fair, figuring out Cross Country practices for Noah, work for me, and more besides that I can't remember. I was quite stressed out that first week. The second week went much better and we finally got to every subject. 

Samuel getting his teeth clean.