School Again

Well, first day of school today. It was fun, confusing and awful, all in one! The confusing part was trying to figure out which activity sheets to do when, and paging between two files to find what I needed. I’ve rearranged the material though so tomorrow will already be better. The fun part was the variety. Today we learned about Martin Luther, how rainbows are made and the water cycle, we read a chapter from the Boxcar Children, and did Aesop’s fable, the Crow and the Pitcher. Then we did the experiment of putting water in a bottle and filling it with pebbles to make the level rise, just like the crow. That was all fun. The horrible part was the language section, which is the literacy part – Caleb couldn’t hold his pencil nicely, or couldn’t write the letters, so he dissolved into tears, despite my reassurances that it was normal to have forgotten a lot of what he’d learned last year. I think we got it sorted out though, but we’ll see what tomorrow brings. Every week we learn a new letter of the alphabet, and this week’s letters is Ff. All in all, I think it was a good morning. We spent about two hours, including a tea break where I hung up the washing, doing school. We haven’t yet started the maths program or the family fitness program, and I think they are easing us into the year with the read-alouds, so I imagine we will increase our time to about three hours per day.

We went out to lunch, to people in the church who live in Sandy Bay. It was a really, really nice visit – Mervyn surprised us by being quite chatty when you got him on the right topic, and very well spoken. We had always thought of him as one of the shy-stare-at-the-ground non-conversationalists, so although the conversation wasn’t sizzling, it wasn’t overly awkward! They are a super couple and we enjoyed the time with them. Daphne cooked up a storm – roast potatoes, delicious (the best to date) drumsticks, a stew (non-curried for my benefit), rice, cabbage, fishcakes, and a salad. She said she doesn’t cook very well and was very modest about the meal, but we were very complimentary. The boys also enjoyed it, and both had second helpings. Pudding was ice-cream, and Daphne couldn’t find a tin of peaches she was sure she had, but we didn’t mind at all.