Shasta's First Day of Joy School

As if I don't have the busiest schedule in the world right now, I decided to team up with some friends to do Joy School with our kids. And I must say, I might be more excited about it than Shasta... and she's pretty darn excited!

Every single day Shasta asks me if it's time for her to go to school. And she's always disappointed when it's me who goes to school and not her. And unfortunately, I go to school four days a week and she only goes once a week on Fridays. And every week it feels like Friday will never get here... for both of us!

Every Friday morning she is SO excited when it's finally school day. She gets dressed as quickly as possible, brushes her hair, teeth, puts on her play makeup, even gets her shoes on. And as soon as she's done she announces, "one girl's ready to go"! (That's her new phrase every time we get ready to go somewhere. And as each girl in our house is finished getting ready she says it again only with the correct number. "Two girls are ready to go"... "Three girls are ready to go"! She's awesome!)

Joy School is with two other families; my friend Jaime and her three kids, Lizzy, Robyn (twins that are 4 days younger than Shasta), and Lincoln, and Jaime's sister in-law Marlyn and her daughter Taegan. Since we're all new to this whole Joy School thing, right now we're just focusing on the alphabet and numbers. Each week we focus on one letter and one number. The first week we reviewed the whole alphabet and talked about the letters in their names. Today we started with the letter A and the number 1. We rotate homes each week so it's up to each host how they want to do the lesson, but we'll always talk about the letter and number that we're on, sing songs, and do a craft or activity of some kind. And each week the kids will do a show and tell where they'll bring something in that starts with the letter they learned about from the week before to help them make more connections during the week. Oh, and we have lunch together!

The craft the first day was just coloring the letters of their name. I forgot to take pictures of them during the lesson. They were so cute with their notepads and crayons, practicing the letters in their names. It makes me sad that I didn't get any pictures.

I'm so excited about this new arrangement. I've been studying child development in school and I've had to do a few labs working with children age 0-3. I have a lot of ideas for activities and crafts and I'm really excited to get to apply this knowledge that I've worked so hard to gain in school! Haha! I'm hosting next week with the letter B and the number 2 and I have so many fun ideas that I don't even know how to narrow it down.

I don't have very high expectations for Shasta to come out of this being able to write the whole alphabet or all her numbers; not that I don't think she's capable of doing it, but because that's not my goal for her. I just want her to be able to have some structure and get to participate in group activities. If she learns a few things along the way, that's great! And it's good for us because we have two hours every Friday dedicated to a structured activity we do every week and then we take time every day to practice what we learned. I'm trying to get us on a better schedule so this will help. Plus, it's great because Shasta wants so much to be like her school-going mom and now she can. Even though I have a lot on my plate right now with being a full time student, working 150 hours for my practicum, 3 church callings (2 of which have become VERY time consuming), full time mom, and now Joy School, I'm so excited to have something in common with Shasta and see the joy she gets from being a student like her mom!