Our First Day of Homeschool

Since this blog came about several weeks after we started homeschooling, I have decided to go back and post retroactively, in order to catch up to the present. I take a ton of pictures in order to document our days. Hopefully I can catch up pretty quickly, so that I am only posting once a day.

MARCH 19, 2018. Our first day of homeschool! 

You know how, as homeschool moms, we sometimes have these grand plans of how we want our days to go? Yeah. That was definitely me on the first day. I had plans, people. I had mapped out our day down to the 15 minute increment. We were going to have an amazing first day. Amazing!! 

 We would enjoy morning time, songs, crafts, and lots of exciting lessons. It was going to be fun and relaxing and calm. I wanted to set the tone for how our homeschool was going to be. But then life happened.

 During a bathroom break, I hear my daughter screaming from upstairs "THE TOILET IS GOING TO BLOW!!!! HURRY!!" I ran up the stairs in time to hear and see water flowing out of the bathroom door and into the hallway. And it kept running. I shut off the supply line to stop the water and yelled to my kids to get all of the towels we owned. 

  I thought to myself "This is not in the plan. We don't have time for this today. This is going to mess everything up!!!!" But then it struck me- this is a learning opportunity. So, we rolled with it and I turned this mess into a life skills lesson. 

 I taught them how to be thorough and check everything they could think of. I explained how sneaky water can be and how to be a detective in order to track it down. When our mess was cleaned up, I taught them how to turn the supply line off and then back on and, they all took their turn.

 I taught the kids how to plunge the toilet. I taught them how to clean up the water (it was only water, thank goodness!) 

 They all pitched in to help. They all took their turns.

Some of them enjoyed it more than others.

 When our very lengthy, very hands-on life skills lesson was over, we got back to our history and our math and our language arts, etc. Our day went longer than planned but no one seemed to mind.  

All in all, it really was a great first day. The kids learned the necessity of a supply line and how to plunge a toilet. I learned that we can't always plan every last detail, and sometimes, we learn a lot more when we just roll with it. 

-Heather