Dear Maisy and Penny,

Today marked our first day of school! We are continuing our homeschool adventure. It is a perfect year to stay the course as COVID 19 stuff still has "normal life" flipped on it's head. Schools only recently announced plans! As a result I didn't debate for very long what our family would be doing, especially when friends started asking me for curriculum recommendations for their Elementary kiddos. I may always have this debate in my head, constantly flipping through the pros and cons of the options: homeschool, private school (namely St. Paul's), and public school. I attended public school throughout and received a good education and was not marred... but I've learned I'm one of the lucky ones and especially with the school systems these days. We loved the P4J program at St. Pauls for you Maisy so it's a strong candidate for future learning as I often find myself at war with wondering if I'm doing enough to stimulate you and if, at some point, we'll need to find you more social interaction one way or another. Homeschool has been fantastic. I feel inadequate as a teacher often times, like things should be more exciting or more planned out or more purposeful and on and on, but I'm loving this built in time engaging with you and you are such a fast and amazing learners! What I know right now is that homeschooling is the only predictable bet for this school year. Things will keep changing in the schools to adapt to the COVID 19 progress, or lack thereof, but at home we can be steady.

This year I hope for more of the same and some more exciting newness in our curriculum plans. Penny, my goals for you are to solidify your fine motor skills with proper pencil and scissors manipulation, letter and number visual recognition, shapes, and maybe even start working on writing letters and numbers correctly. Maisy, my goals for you are spelling, sentence writing, and maybe even getting to some division by the end of the year.

I love that I have this unique problem, and that's fending you off for an hour or two in the mornings so we can start homeschool after important things like breakfast, morning chores, and a walk for me. You guys had your stuff out at 6:15am ready to do school immediately. And then proceeded to badger me about when we were going to start up until we started at 8:30am. It's cute, also exhausting, but cute! I feel like I have to sprint through the morning just to get school started for you!

So here's to a good school year my dears! We have lots of awesome learning to do with field trips, school themes, and holidays sprinkled in for a little extra fun!

Love you,

Mommy