Yesterday was our first day of homeschool and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. The kids were pumped and had great attitudes. I am well aware that this is the honeymoon stage, but aren’t honeymoons wonderful?

The first thing that greeted them was a chalkboard with a message and a table with goodies (very practical homeschool supplies) for each child!

The next thing we did was take pictures. Even though they are homeschooling we got them all new clothes for the occasion and we had to get the traditional first day of school photos.

Elle is 4 years old and in PRE-K. I didn’t get a great pic of her by herself because I didn’t want to spend an hour on photos. Here she is though!

Ezie is 7 and in 2nd grade!

SJ is 10 years old and in 4th grade.

Z is 12 and in 7th grade. He actually will be enrolled in his public school online. He is still officially doing homeschool with us, but he has three classes in the morning that are accredited through our school district.

The kids are excited about this next chapter. I think it helps that their cousins who are some of their closest friends have always been homeschooled so they are familiar with the idea.

After photos we celebrated day one with another tradition- BREAKFAST! This year we had Mickey Mouse Waffles with strawberries and whipped cream, along with bacon, eggs, and OJ.

The main curriculum we are using is called Miacademy. This is how they will get individualized basic lessons in each of the core subjects along with some extras like typing, Bible, and Spanish. So far they love the setup.

We ate lunch in the treehouse and read from a chapter book. They also worked on worksheets for their specific grade level. I plan to do one main activity each day together as a family. Today was to create a poster that represented what we felt like our homeschool will be all about.

They decided to name our school “Busch Academy” and they drew pictures of things that interest them which mostly included rainbows, rockets, and chickens.

We ended the day with journaling about what they thought about the first day of Homeschool. Good news, they were all really into it.

All in all yesterday was very lowkey. I wanted to start off with dipping our toe in for day one. I talked to the kids about some rules, I made a sign to put on our door to alleviate interruptions, and we talked about the general schedule. J prayed over us and I explained to the kids about how this was going to be something that I was learning along with them. We discussed how things might change as we go and have a better understanding about what works and what doesn’t.

In 2012 I wrote a blog post called “Processing the Diagnosis“. It’s very emotional to look back on because it’s when we learned that SJ was deaf. That season is definitely one of the most challenging. In that blog post I said something that makes me choke up now, but also gives me so much hope as I find myself homeschooling my kids for the first time while living in an era of a historical pandemic. I said that while there are still a lot of unknowns and I am sure some days will be easier than others, we are handling all of it one step at a time. I compared it to a video of SJ’s first steps (there was a video in the original blog post here). The song I added to accompany the video says “We’ll learn together, you and I” and that pretty much sums it up then and now. This is new for all of us, but we are all going to learn how to do this together.