First Day of School

Today was our first official day back to school. For kindergarten we schooled through July and then took off the whole month of August. The break was good, but now we're on to first grade.
John and Gracie started their morning with homemade banana bread and some organic yogurt, oh, and of course their vitamins. John quickly asked if we could have a picnic. This is something I started about a month ago. We usually have a picnic atleast one time a day. We eat our food on a blanket spread on the living room floor, and after I'm finished eating I read aloud to them as they are the slowest eaters in the world. My mom says I'm just reaping what I sowed.

We then headed outside for some "First Day of School" pictures. In the background are all of John's new plants this year. He has become a plant fanatic.

Below John and Gracie are hard at work. I built a problem for John with our Math U See blocks and he's writing down what the number is. The number pictures is 124.

Gracie is busy sorting her beads. These are from our Preschool Activities in a bag swap. She uses her tripod grasp when picking them up.

This is our chart as we are counting how many days of school and after we reach 100 days of school we will have a celebration where we do lots of things with the number 100. Gracie put the fish on this year first as John did it last year. I told her it looks like he's trying to jump out of the bowl and she said the fish was just waiting for his food. The tape looks terrible, but it's the only thing that will keep it up on our basement walls. John is busy writing in the salt box. He already knows how to write his numbers, but we are gearing up for him to wrote them proportionally on primary lines. He's done this a few times on our dry erase board. They love the salt box.
John is placing our story disk on China. We are reading the Story of Ping this week for FIAR. We were discussing the Yangtze River and the Chinese culture. We watched a very interesting video called Families of China. It was really good. It was sad though how much the one little girl talked about the government and how they only "allow" them to have one child per family. John of course said that was not right. Amen, little guy!
Even though Gracie is looking a little whacky here, they are showing off their little booklets they made. One is of China's flag and the other is of a map of China. We took time to look at pictures of the Yangtze River online.

Now I just need to find some chopsticks for them to eat with. Not so bad for our first day of school.
P.S. I don't know why the date turned out wrong on these photos. It's suppose to be 09/02/2008. I checked my camera and my camera says it's 09/02/2008. I finally figure out how to post these pictures and now the date is wrong :)