First Day of 7th Grade - The Work Begins!

We're still figuring things out here but the deal is, that we're going to go ahead with our curriculum plans for two weeks time and then we will sit down together and reevaluate things and switch things up if needed.

Today we got done with all of our studies a bit after 1pm and had started in on them at 9am. We enjoyed a nice lunch that wasn't rushed. Not too bad...but, at the end of the day Zoey mentioned that she felt she did a lot of reading. Like maybe too much.

On the one hand I do agree with her, pretty much all of her geography, literature and science today consisted of reading material. That could mean that we need to...

A.) switch up the order of things
B.) have some breaks here and there in-between
or
C.) we need to switch something up completely.

On the other hand, I have to remember that she's coming out of essentially two years from the charter school hardly doing any reading at all. They had no textbooks (besides her math workbook) and any reading that was done on her behalf was online/research type of reading and the three books they read all year for literature (and one or two for film class). She did read books on her own that she was interested in from the library. Not enough in my opinion.

Today we started with math. She wants to start with her least favorite subject and get it over with. I'm perfectly fine with that. It consisted of watching a short video of Mr. Demme presenting the lesson and then her whipping through 4 pages of it on her own. She's really comfortable with using Math-U-See and I am thrilled. She's been working on it this summer and really has nailed down some concepts that she struggled with before in her public charter school. We're really happy with math this year. Yay!

After math we had geography. In geography she read from Geography of the World about how to use the book, how to read and use general map tools, etc. Then together we read the first chapter from The Road to There by Val Ross, which I was surprised with...it was pretty interesting!

Zoey then created a map of Pangaea.

She enjoyed geography and I found that a bit interesting since she wasn't really thinking that she would initially when looking over the books this summer as they came in the mail.

After geography Zoey worked on grammar which consisted of working on learning prepositions from her Easy Grammar book and then she did page 1 of her Daily Grams book which was correcting capitalization, punctuation and sentence formations. She enjoys grammar so far.

Here is where we broke for lunch around 11:30 or so. While I got lunch ready, Zoey read her book for literature which is A Wrinkle in Time. She is enjoying the book so far and was required to just read the first chapter. *Thinking ahead...perhaps I'll have her read her book for literature before bed each night which would make the school day feel like less reading material?

After lunch we had science. Which...was more reading. This is kind of where she hit a wall and I could see her starting to kind of panic. It was a lot of reading but...I want to press on and see what happens after a week or so and we will adjust if needed. In addition to her science reading today (from two book's and a magazine) she labeled the parts of an animal/human cell and watched an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy on cells (which was a bit cheesy but fun).

As you can see, Leo wasn't sold on today's science reading either...

After we were done with our school work we went to the park (kind of felt like we were doing something against the law since other kids were still at school!) and got some energy out and then I got her a blueberry smoothie for an afternoon treat before coming back home.

A good first day...not as exciting as perhaps Zoey thought it would be but it was fruitful and she has already learned a lot. There's a learning curve that we need to be open to, both of us!

Phew! We made it!