Still Getting Ready

This morning the kids returned my announcement that they would be spending the day with Papa and Abuelita again with delighted shouts of "yes!"  Today was Day 2 of Operation Get Ready to Homeschool and I had another solid five hours to plan and prep.


And plan and prep, I did!  


I started by ordering the rest of the school supplies we need for this experiment.  There are one or two small things left to purchase but I need to go to the store and see them before I pick them out.  This post helped me with items I had not thought of but realized after reading it that they would be useful.  From the ideas in it, I purchased a laminator, the twistable colored pencils and the color pens.  


Our lab is almost complete.  I am hoping we can get an overhead light in there this weekend or next.  I also need to clean out and organize that cabinet in the corner which will house supplies and reference materials.  

I spent most of the day continuing to prepare the materials for our history curriculum, Tapestry of Grace.  I finished printing and three hole punching the maps and the evaluations for Unit Two of the curriculum.  

All that printing and I did not run out of ink!  However, I  did run out of time before I was able to get them into the binders.  That should be a fairly quick project I can get to soon enough, though.  


I also assembled one of the lapbooks for Unit One of TOG.  It was an intimidating project that took more time than I had hoped.  Here's what the dining room table looked like at the start:

And here it is midway through the project:

And now for the finished product:

Phew, did I ever heave a sigh of relief when that was done!  As you can see, I decided not to assemble the lapbook completely.  I thought it might be more fun for our dear test subjects to put them together as they go along.  I only had enough time to assemble one of the Unit One lapbooks.  I hope to do the other before school starts.  I'll leave Unit Two's lapbooks unassembled for the time being.  Maybe the boys will want to do it themselves???


The Math-U-See manipulative blocks are now bagged, organized and in a basket in the boys' reach.

I also spent time today tweaking the lesson plans I had worked on a few weeks ago.  I finally had some time to sit down and start playing with this fun tool!  After I tweaked the lesson plans, I entered them in the planner along with lots of other information such as important dates, field trip information, etc.  All of it will eventually go into a binder for easy reference.  

A few more things to buy, a little more organizing and then it's go time!  I'm feeling really excited and a little anxious.  While they are not really excited about hitting the books again, the boys still are excited about this experiment of ours.  It's starting to feel more real to all of us, I think. 


As for RA, she is beyond excited to start Kindergarten.  We have her uniforms all hung up and ready to go.  A new lunchbox and backpack are on their way.  We are still waiting to hear who her teacher will be but we can't go wrong with either choice, really, so we are waiting patiently.


How are your back to school plans going?  Are your children excited for another school year or dreading the fateful day?