The First Day of School

I'm a little terrified to write this, because I feel as though if I do, then it's 'real', you know?  I can't go 'back'.  I can't change my mind, which is, of course, utter nonsense.  So I'm going to say it.  Today was our first day of school.

I've intended to homeschool Samuel as long as I can remember.  I love the idea of keeping my children close to me, of all the things I can teach them and the benefits they would have with their parents as their primary teachers.  But of course I've been nervous.  Who wouldn't be?

I reassured myself that Samuel was still very very young and I didn't need to think about school for, oh, surely years and years more.  Except that one day I woke up and here was this curious, verbal two and a half year old boy with way too much energy.  Just as I had made the decision to abstain from solid foods for Samuel's first year, a decision that put me in direct conflict with our public health nurse and was considered somewhat 'radical', but which turned out to be exactly right for him, so I started to wonder why I had to wait for a certain age to start schooling.

Here's how my pep talk to myself went:

"Ok.  Ok.  It's ok.  Right?  Right?  He's your child.  You aren't teaching university level calculus here.  He likes watching construction equipment.  He likes playing with his dollhouse.  He likes picking up rocks and making cookies.  This is clearly not rocket science.  You pick a topic, something he likes, and you do some stuff about it.  This is preschool, for goodness sakes, it isn't even kindergarten!"

Of course, what I was really trying to tell myself is "You are not going to mess this up."

Which is why today I said to David "We're going to do some preschool stuff today".  And David said "Great!"  and we started.  We started with pinecones.

We watched this video:



My thought was that we could make pinecone bird feeders and maybe talk about birds migrating, since Samuel has been starting to recognize birds by sight now, and keeps asking me which bird is making what noise.  And birdfeeders meant that we needed to go collect pinecones.

I was fortunate that Clara had fallen asleep for her morning nap and David was home.  And so Samuel and I walked over to the park and collected pinecones from under the pine trees.  He loved it.  Loved it.  I've never just given him a bag and told him to pick up pinecones before.  What started out as collecting pinecones turned into MY first lesson on homeschooling:

1)  What you think you are teaching is not what you're teaching.

This was supposed to be the prelude to birdfeeders and instead it turned into an impromtu lesson on why we couldn't find any pinecones under the maple trees, only under the pine trees.  Wow.

And because we were at the park, we played for a bit, which was great because it was OUR homeschool day and we could plan it however we liked.  We stomped in puddles on the way home, with a stop at the library.

I'd hoped to heavily utilize the local public library for our homeschool, at least until we had built a decent library on our own.  But it turned out the library was closed today, and so we'll have to go tomorrow.

We got home, went grocery shopping, had a nap, and all throughout the day we discussed pinecones.  Once you started looking for them you could find them everywhere.  We amassed quite the collection.

In the afternoon we dumped out our pinecone collection and started playing around with it.  We made shapes, we put them in a line, we talked about some being green and some being brown.  I showed him that some cones were open and some were still shut.  And then we moved them around in dump trucks and generally had a fun time with them, cleaning them up at the end of the day.

Was it 'school'?  Well, that depends.  Probably not, by any strict sense of the word, but it was purposeful learning, which is what homeschool is all about.