First day of kindergarten!

So today was the first day of kindergarten using our new oak meadow curriculum, and it went well. Better than I had hoped in fact. We slept a little later than I had intended, but still did everything we needed to before OT.

 Basically, we had our morning circle, and instead of lighting a candle I used our Tibetan singing bowl to "ring in" the start. We said our opening verse and sang some songs from our hootenanny book, or rather *I* sang them and max dance and leaped around the room.  Then we rang the bell again.  I think I like this new short version of morning circle rather than the one I had been doing.  Short and sweet, without enough time for him to loose focus.

Then we went over our white board of today's schedule.  This isn't an oak meadow thing, but it's
become necessary to write and check off our tasks for the day.. The fewer surprises for max the easier it is to get him from A to B.

Last night we had read Peter Rabbit, and this morning we read it again, and I explained to him that we would be talking about the letter A and doing a picture of a gate and a letter A as shown in the beginning of the story.  I think he's retaining the story pretty well, although he's not really able to repeat back to me the sequence of events, he is asking questions about why Peter lost his shoes and jacket, why the cat wouldn't help Peter and saying how much he liked Peter hiding in the watering can.  He was very concerned about Peter feeling tired and wet.  And I actually got him to draw.  It doesn't look anything like the gate with the big red letter A, but just that I got him to use those beeswax crayons of his own accord is a HUGE win.  He talked about the drawing while he was doing it, and while it doesn't really look like anything, he drew peter rabbit with his blue jacket and buttons,
 the gate next to him (with a letter A in the same color right on top of it). He then added a rainbow
and grass and sky.  I was so proud!

We then had some free play time before OT, in which we played Legos together.

After lunch, we had scheduled our afternoon activity to be music and movement.  The oak meadow syllabus suggested a few rounds of head shoulders knees and toes.  Max sometimes likes this and sometimes doesn't.  I can interest him sometimes in naming other body parts instead to touch... But today for some reason he was super interested in ballet again.  So I went with it.  I have an
instructional ballet lesson for kids that I purchased from amazon.  We sort of half followed that and half made up our own and leaped around the room.  Man am I out of shape. Heh.

Anyway, once we were done with that, we went back into the playroom for creative play.  I brought
out his blocks and he built a replica of a racetrack and grandstand.

Then we recreated radiator springs in alphabet blocks and put all the cars in their respective houses.

Strangely enough, max has been really interested in the difference between outlined cartoon drawings and ones that look more realistic like when things are 3D animated in movies and TV these days.  So this all led to a discussion about whether or not you could draw lightening McQueen without using outlines.  I did this illustration to try and show him the difference between drawing outlined and not.  I hope this will help with later oak meadow drawings.

Anyway, I think things went really well today.  Now we are relaxing.  Here's hoping for tomorrow!