School's in Session!

A beautifully breezy morning - not too chilly, not too hot - provided the perfect backdrop for the grand opening of Zephyr Academy. As much as I'd like to deny it, Vance is growing up. Not a month ago, we celebrated his fifth birthday. Since Vance is now old enough to begin Junior Kindergarten, our home school has officially welcomed it's first class of one.

Along with younger brother Edward, who will be auditing this class at his leisure.

Though we're drawing inspiration and ideas from many sources, the core of the curriculum we're using for the Kindergarten years comes from Waldorf Essentials. The school year is based around an ongoing story about a kind and clever little gnome named Super Sam, and a little corner of our home has been transformed into "Super Sam's world."

Vance already adores Super Sam, and thoroughly delighted in immersing himself in the fanciful kingdom.

After a perfectly peachy morning, we had planned a long walk to a favorite park, where we planned to play and to look for fallen leaves. I suppose things had been going too perfectly, because it was time for the best laid plans of mice and moms to be laid to waste. Right outside of our front door, on this auspicious first day of school, some rather industrious gentlemen were hard at work fixing up our parking lot. How could we not watch something so exciting?

Luckily, one of the benefits of homeschooling is its inherent flexibility, so we spent nearly an hour being fascinated by liquid asphalt splashing onto the parking lot, being spread around and smoothed down like shiny black paint, and slowly changing color as it dried in the sun. Yes, we got our jollies "watching paint dry." I'm okay with that. We even made it to a park after all, if not the one we had initially planned.