First day of school

The first day of school worked well. I think everyone had a good time. The girls had some homeschooling girlfriends over in the afternoon; those girls had started today, too. So it was nice to celebrate together. Madison and Ella always like having these girls over. These friends have serious dairy allergies, and Oreos are artificial enough that they contain no dairy. So we always serve Oreos when they come over. This, too, is a big deal.

(The leftovers are not calling me from the downstairs cupboard right now. They are not.)

Today, I realized anew how much more smoothly everything goes if I have the schedule and assignments written out ahead of time, one page per child per day. So I'll try to have that done the night before, each day. I've already printed out tomorrow's work schedule, which includes the things we didn't get to today (which was spelling). (In spelling, by the way, we're doing Writing Road to Reading in the following way: We're taking five words per day on the WRTR list. I'm going over them with the WRTR annotations. And then, the girls take the words to their computers. They open a document I've prepared, type the words five times in lower case, five times in upper case, and then print out the document and handwrite the words on the lines provided on the page.)

Our new Spanish program, Visual Link Spanish, arrived this afternoon. It's cheaper than Rosetta Stone. The girls and I did the free lesson online that week, and Madison liked it enough that I thought we'd give it a whirl. (Ella tuned out. Let's see what happens when it's part of school.)