Collage Friday ~ First School Days of 2013

We enjoyed an abbreviated school week. I took Monday to do a little cleaning and cooked some special New Year's Eve treats and I rested a lot since I felt a serious cold coming on. My husband had Tuesday off, so we enjoyed a lazy family day, and we set the alarms before going to bed so we could resume a somewhat normal schedule on Wednesday. Doing school Wednesday-Friday was a great way to ease back into the school routine around here. I like to call this method a "slow start." We did a lot of silent reading, finished a read aloud, reviewed and progressed in our math lessons, wrote in our journals, made thank you videos and wrote thank you letters for Christmas gifts. I am actually looking forward to spending some time laying out our lesson plans for next week as we hit things full force.

I wanted to squeeze in a fun photo collage from Sunday. We got a good amount of snow on Saturday, so my husband decided to pack up all our snow clothes and sleds and take them with us to church on Sunday. As soon as church was over, we changed and went sledding at our church because there are some awesome hills on the property. When we were done, we treated the kids to lunch out (which is a rare Sunday treat). It was a super fun afternoon.

I believe thank you letters are important. If people were kind and thoughtful enough to bless our family, then the respectful and kind thing to do is to write a simple thank you note. For a homeschool mom like me, this is also a sneaky way to get in a little extra writing practice as well. I believe a lot of kids are not being taught letter writing or how to address envelopes anymore because of all the electronic communicating we do. I found a cute little graphic (for free) to download and use on our Christmas thank you letters. Instead of writing thank you letters, we made a few thank you videos to send to our faraway family members. The children had a lot of fun. I'll attach a video at the end of the post if you're interested in seeing how we did it.

My son received books 1-4 of the Cooper Kids Adventure Series for Christmas and he is reading them quickly! One day I had to wait for him to come to the table for math because he HAD to finish the chapter he was reading and I'm fine with that since there was a time I wondered if the boy was ever going to learn to read.

My 10-year-old daughter got a Kindle for Christmas and I snapped a picture of her this morning. The computer was all ready for her to slide over and do her Teaching Textbooks lesson, but like her brother, she HAD to finish the chapter she was reading.

How was your Christmas break (if you took one)? I enjoyed ours very much, but am looking forward to the fresh start January helps give us. I am linking up again this week with Collage Friday hosted by Homegrown Learners. 

Here's a video the children made for some Missouri family who sent them some gifts. We thought it would be fun to make some videos instead of writing letters to some of our family members.

Christmas Thank You Video