Yesterday The Monkey started his first day of school. Traditionally when a child begins school you get them dressed up in a new outfit, put their little superhero or princess backpack on them and walk them to the bus stop. That at least is the picture in my head of first days of school. Since The Monkey is only two and a half, his first day of school looked a little bit different.
Around 9 AM I sat down at the kitchen table with The Monkey on my right and his little brother, The Puppy, fussing and walking around our legs. The Monkey and I went over the letters A, B, and C, by looking at the print outs from the ABC Home Preschool Curriculum we purchased.
For his first day of school we
- talked about uppercase and lowercase letters,
- traced the outlines for a big and little “A”
- practiced holding the pencil correctly.
The Monkey enjoyed getting to use the colored pencils that I told him were his to keep, and trying to trace straight lines. I think he was enjoying having meaningful work instead of 18 hours straight of building a block garage for his cars with The Puppy remodeling it for him every few minutes by throwing his whole body into the block creation.
And then, like in school, the bell rang. The only difference being that the bell at home that signals the end of our school time is a fussy 10 month old instead of a sound over and intercom. Needless to say we ended school for the day and despite the absence of a cool backpack I think we had a really good first day of school – all 15 minutes of it.
On a related note, it was also Evan’s first day back at school. His students were back yesterday and they’ll be in the classroom today. That means we’ve officially begun our second year here. It will be interesting to see what this year holds in store for him and for our son, now that we’re “officially” sending him to school… at the kitchen table.
[Photo by caniswolfie]
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