First Day of School

Andres-Jose's 1st Day of Kindergarten Interview Questions:

1.  What's your favorite movie?  Batman, the one where he's throwing a batarang on the DVD cover.
2.  What's your favorite toy?  This one (pointing to Cars movie toy cars)  I love these guys.
3.  What's your favorite book or story?  This one!  Super Friends Monster Madness!
4.  What's your favorite breakfast?  Granola with milk.
5. What's your favorite vegetable?  Is dragon fruit a vegetable?  No?  Okay.  Carrots, because Bugs Bunny eats carrots and I love Bugs Bunny!
6.  What's your favorite color?  Red, black and yellow.  (Okay, plural works.)
7.  What's your favorite clothing?  T-shirts.
8.  What's your favorite song?  That song that Raph likes, his favorite song is my favorite song, too.  Pumped Up Kicks?  Yeah.  Pumped Up Kicks.  It's cool.
9.  What's your favorite sports?  Football.  Seahawks.
10.  What's your favorite day of the year?  Christmas!
11.  What's your favorite dessert?  Ice cream with rhubarb sauce and cookie crumbs (rhubarb crisp).
12.  What do you want to be when you grow up?  A paleontologist.  I love dinosaurs and want to study them!
13.  Where's your favorite place to go?  Ian's house.
14.  What's your happiest memory?   Going to the dino show with Gramma Pam.
15.  If you could be an animal, which one would you want to be and why?  I'd be a cheetah because I love them and they're fast and blurry.
16.  What do you love the most about your brother?  I love Raph because he's learning to talk and he's very nice and he comforts me at bedtime.
17.  What's the kindest thing you've ever done for someone?  I gave Ian my toys that he wanted.
18.  Who's your best friend?  Ian Votrobeck.
19.  What's your favorite TV show?  Wild Kratts!
20.  What do you want to learn in school this year?  I want to learn about dinosaurs!


It was definitely NOT an ideal first day of homeschool.  I wish I could say that I awoke to early autumn sunshine and birdsong, but rather I jerked out of bed with a nauseating qualm that was oh-so familiar.  As a teacher in middle school for 8 years, the first day of school was always a nerve-wracking day.  Was I prepared enough?  Would the students like me?  Would I like them?  I was hyper-conscientious of unwanted boogies in my nose that may be viewable to the public, triple checking my slack's zipper and blouse's buttons to make sure all undergarments were appropriately concealed, and running several tech checks on the doc-cam or other in class technology items that I would be needing for the day.  I was shocked to have the same feelings on this, the first day of homeschooling.  my.  own.  child.

I called the office that coordinates our materials and curricula for the year yesterday to inquire about the time of the ice cream social three days from then, only to discover to my horror that school started the next day.  I was utterly unprepared.  I suppose I expected an orientation on the curriculum. Or I thought we would have learning plans and teacher conferences first.  I was outraged that 1) no one had notified me the date to start teaching was September 5, the same day as the classes start in schools in our district, 2) that we had not been prepared as to HOW we should use the 70 pounds of books that UPS dropped off a couple weeks ago, 3) that we hadn't even met with his teachers and didn't know who they would be yet, and 4) was completely unaware that 75% of the work in this program is done ONLINE.  My nausea was valid.  This was a mess!  I was up until 1 am trying to log into our account to prepare for the day, and it wouldn't let me in at all, supposedly because school didn't actually start until today.  I wasn't able to even see what I was supposed to teach, and from my materials we received, there were too many gaping holes, too much missing content and directives, that even I--a certified public school teacher with a decade of working with schools and students--could not navigate my way to a lesson plan or daily plan.  I was panicking.

Until this morning.  When I lurched out from my cozy sheets to log into the slowwwwwwest program in modern age and discovered to another horror that the day would require 3 hours of online tutorials in addition to 5 hours of teaching content, totaling eight (yes! 8) hours!

Was it too late to walk to Riverview and register him?  No.  It wasn't.  But it wasn't where I wanted him, either.  Panic and dispair smothered me.

So, I hammered away at it this morning, skipping over most of the tutorials and digging into the books and various manipulatives, {finally having access to badly writ online lesson plans} and once Raph was down for the count after lunch, AJ and I could get to work.  We broke out Handwriting Without Tears, and we did math.  I was very pleased to see that although a little rusty, most of his skills that we worked on from January to May were solid and surfaced after a little grease.  Then he rested for an hour and I watched a DVD about using their phonics kit, which helped a lot, and we ended up really enjoying that piece.  Then Raph was awake and it was time to play outside, while I investigated the History component online.  Okay, great.  The ENTIRE history lesson was online!  Lame!  (We ended up skipping that lesson.  I don't want him logged onto the screen all day.  I try hard to limit his screen time so we think we'll need to invest in a independent history curriculum that is textbook and hands-on based.  But I digress.)

We still had history and language arts (literature) to do, and after dinner we rushed our 35 library books back to the library lest they follow through with the threat to charge us $387.15 for missing or lost books.

But here's where I noticed the difference.  

He reached for my hand as we entered the library, his smaller feet in stride with mine.  He held the door open for me.  We sat with crossed legs on the floor of the nonfiction section of the children's books with 15 minutes until the library closed, flipping through the books around us and chatting randomly about Harry Potter, Sitting Bull, and Sikhs.   Peacefully.  Friendly. Lovingly.

On the way home he and I laughed, genuine light-hearted laughs, about little things and simple things.  When we came home, exhausted from our first day of school and with me (perhaps him as well) very ready to wrap it all up, we charged through our literature lesson (also lamely online) with flying colors to shut down around 9 pm.

And my personal goal this year is not only to teach him to read, but teach him to love learning through reading.  So I encouraged him to read to us for 20 minutes tonight (and nightly from now on) from a book of his choice, expecting a battle to ensue because he's tired and I'm tired and we all just wanted it over by this point.  But he jumped up and grabbed his BOB books, and he read to me.  He read with eager joy, with pride, with focused effort.  He was reading!  And stunned at the sudden fluency he was demonstrating, I summoned Aaron who snuggled in with us to listen to the child read yet another BOB book.   At the end of it, Aaron wrapped his son up and with chins on shoulders they both shut their eyes, silently relishing the moment, soaking it up, breathing it in.  And I, the Mom, felt my own eyes burn and brim with tears at the beauty I was witnessing.

At the end of the day, and it is late in the course of a long day, Andres has been my teacher.  It's not about the best lessons, or the preparation, or the effectiveness of chosen curricula.  Don't get me wrong.  That stuff counts for sure.  But it's  not a deal breaker.  It's him.  And me.  And life skills.  And life.  And love.  And our family quartette drawing into each other and God in stormy times and quiet times.  Working through it.  Together.

And I think I need to remember I'm still just as much a student as he is.