First day of Kindergarten!

We need to send a special 'thank you' to Uncle Dean and Aunt Joan, who just spent a month in Europe, and got Gavin this awesome Crusader costume while they were in France!  It has had lots of use in the two days since we got it!

Here we are ready for the first day of Kindergarten (and junior preschool)!

We said our Pledge of Allegiance and did our days of the week.

Austin helped put the weather on our board using both 'hot' and 'sunny'.  Austin is learning the letter 'e', the color red, the shape circle and the number 1 - all are on our circle time board.

While Gavin and I read the story of Creation from our Scholastic Bible, Austin played with his bird color matching game.  He did it perfectly without any help!

Then we went to our table and Austin colored some objects red.  He also colored the circles inside three sunflowers but I didn't take a picture of that!

Then he used dot paint to make the letter 'E'.  He did great getting his dots in the circles for his first time using these paints.  We used red paint since that's our color right now.

Meanwhile, Gavin worked on listening for short 'i' in words that I said aloud.  The first few weeks of phonics will be really easy for him.  We are going to do two lessons a day for a while and then we'll slow down as it gets harder.  The only thing kind of new in this is that it's mainly auditory, listening for the sound in spoken words rather then just looking at the letter and saying saying the sound.

Meanwhile (back at the bat cave...just kidding but it kind of fits) Austin played with his peg stacker game.  I have toys that are only allowed to be played with during school time for Austin so he can be involved but still have fun.

Gavin read six words that have a short 'i' sound and then listened as I said two words, like hat/hit, and he told me which word had a short 'i' in it.

Then we moved on to math.  This math is super easy for Gavin too so we are doing two lessons a day here as well.  I think we will be done with the book by Christmas or not too much later.  This program has certain procedures you have to know and understand because it builds on itself so we are going to do this book quickly (assuming it's as easy for Gavin as I think it will be) and then move on to the 1st grade book.  So today we talked about numbers 1-4 and made the numbers using tally marks (popsicle sticks) and added and subtracted using our tally marks.  Then we did patterns using the popsicle sticks (Gavin was finishing the pattern before I told him we were doing patterns).

Then he sorted the pegs by color.

And finally, we are making a 'Days of Creation' mural.  I say we because I am helping Gavin as he's not a huge fan of coloring for more then a few minutes at a time so I thought it would help if I colored with him.  This actually counted as our science lesson for the day.  We will finish it on Wednesday and start space next week.  Since there is so much evolution, etc. in modern science books I thought it would be wise to start with creation first in science.  Anyway, today we did days 1-3.

Here's the books we read.  We read the Creation story in our Scholastic Bible.

We have been reading Eagle Feather by Clyde Robert Bulla before bed the last few nights.  We will probably finish it tonight.  We will be learning about Indians/early American settlement first in history.

At lunch time we are reading 'The Day Before Yesterday in America'.  This is a wonderful book!

We started space a little today by reading this book:

If you notice behind Austin in some of the pictures above there are Monet 'paintings' on the doors of our cabinets.  That is our art wall.  We will be learning a little about Monet and his artwork this month.  Today we read 'Katie Meets the Impressionists' about a little girl who goes to an art museum with her grandmother and steps in to paintings.  It only has Monet, Renoir and Degas paintings but it is a good start to the Impressionist style.  Plus, it's really cute story-wise!

Austin read 'Baby Elephants' today.  He loved this book!  We had to read it twice.  Each page just has a picture of elephant doing something like "elephants munch" or "elephants stomp" or "elephants stretch" so we pretended we were elephants doing what they were doing.  It was very thrilling!

Then we read about Corduroy's Eggs.  Austin likes Corduroy but after the excitement of the elephant book this was a little disappointing.

While I read to Austin, Gavin played with his see and spell game.

After we finished math Gavin had about 10 minutes of 'free' time and he played with his rhyme matching puzzle before starting scince and art.

All in all our first day of school went well.  Gavin seemed happy and was very proud of the fact he was 'officially' in kindergarten, even asking Jackson if he wanted a tour of his kindergarten room!