179 days to go

We're officially back to school today, and officially official, now that I have a kindergartner to educate.

Abby did great on her first day, and loves helping me go through her "school bucket" of folders containing the day's supply of lesson plans and materials for our core, science, math and language arts. The placement test we took put her in first grade language arts, so we'll see how that goes.

So far her favorite subject is math, which further drives home the fact that she is most definitely her father's daughter. Tonight during bedtime prayers, she prayed and thanked God for math. Guess I better learn to like the subject pretty quickly if I'm going to keep up with her enthusiasm.

Caleb gets some directed attention this year to celebrate the fact that I finally consider him preschool age. I'm not sure what we're going to do for preschool, since all the stuff I did with Abby is stuff he already knows from doing it along with us for the past two years.

I gave him a simple placement test this morning to see what we need to be working on this year, and found that he already knows all of his alphabet (upper and lowercase) and all of the sounds, with the exceptions of about three or four letters. He named all the shapes and colors I showed him, and recognizes numbers up to 10. He can count to 30, or to 100 if you forgive the fact that he skips the numbers 31 through 99. He does not know how to write his name, so we might use up a few months of our school year working on that.

Abby reminded me again that I don't need to worry about him, and that she'll read him all his preschool books while I "make dinner or something." True to her word, she read him some book about dolphins today without my knowledge, and Caleb spent dinnertime educating us all on the parts of the dolphin, how they breathe, and the similarities and differences between dolphins and sharks. Apparently I have a budding marine biologist on my hands.

So what if they don't learn how to play Duck, Duck, Goose this year?