First Day of Kindergarten

It's hard to believe that John is finally at the age where it is time for us to start Kindergarten. We've worked on letters and numbers for a while now and read books to him forever, but here it is time to start 'formal' school, as you can tell we are not very good at 'formal'.



John's day started off with his normal routine bath and lots of giggling and throwing balls in the bathtub, PE and health.



Next was a run with dad, yes, John is armed with a bubble gun, after all dad needs all the motivation he can get. In the end dad took the bubble gun and used it as bait to keep John with him, yet more PE.



After breakfast John went out in the backyard with me and 'helped' hang out clothes. He had a great time zooming across the bumpy yard as fast as he could and then running back and forth under the laundry. In the process he jiggled the thingamajigs that hold his foot pedals loose and then proceeded to fall face first in the floor when we got in. Surely that counts for PE and health, lol, as you can see we are big on PE and health around here. So dad was fixing John's chair and John was helping, as you can see John is quite adept at the proper usage of tools, thus engineering is covered for the day, and by the way he lost a part and as of yet no one can find it, now if I could teach him to map that part out well then we would have hit geography but no, surely that's like a 4th grade subject. So John's chair now has one foot plate attached and he has learned to put both feet on there and stand up anyway, yep, more PE!



While dad was gone running some errands John and I actually did some academic Kindergarten work, several pages of Handwriting Without Tears and some early math skills with his Funtastic Frogs and a bit of fine motor activities with his chalkboard and chalk and then best of all sponges and water, what could be more fun than sponges and water. After that we decided it was time to go out in the yard and shoot John's planes around for a while, 10 times and then back to the old grindstone. Well shot number 5 landed on one side of the roof and the other plane landed on the other side of the roof on shot number 10, math right? When dad came home John was beside himself with joy that the planes were going to be gotten down, but even better was the big stick, actually a fishing pole of papa's but to John well...



...maybe some jousting? PE again, I'm sure.



After playing with the planes in the yard with dad a bit they came back in the house for another engineering class. While Mark was reinforcing the plane wings with 'craft sticks', John showed us what the real use of these are.



John's favorite kitchen helping job is to stand at the sink and fling the lettuce out of the sink full of water into the salad spinner, he's great at this! He even ate a few bites of lunch and then was down for a nap, sorta. Dad relented on our decision that there would be no tv during the school week (except for Signing Times) and let John lay down for what John calls a movie nap, I should have gotten a picture of him curled up in bed with his dvd player watching Tom and Jerry, but really I was mostly just glad that he was enjoying himself and decided to leave good enough alone.



After a nap and a bit more school work it was back outside to shoot some more planes. This one landed in the tree...



...John was thrilled!

For the day we managed to read aloud 5 books, John's choices of a selection that we picked out for him, Curious George, Curious George Goes to the Hospital, Cecily G and the 9 Monkeys, Harry and the Lady Next Door, and No Roses for Harry, do the amount of writing and math skills that we had set out to do, did lots of pe and engineering and even managed to paint for a while. All in all it was a great first day of Kindergarten, planning it to coincide with dad's day off worked out to be a perfect decision and gave us a really good head start. In the morning we start all over but for tonight...



...it's lights out!