I just wanted to share that our first day of school (yes, on July 4th!) went very well! We started the day with LHTH for the 2yo and 4yo (during that time my olders did their reading from their Bibles and R&S Readers). My dc loved everything about LHTH! My 4yo and 2yo are the most challenging to me as far as their behavior goes, and I really think that starting the day focusing on them really made a difference for the rest of the day.

My oldest 3 enjoyed Beyond, commenting frequently that they remembered some of it from 2 years ago (but we only made it to Unit 9 or so back then, so most of it will be new to them). I ended up keeping MOH vol 1 to use as "extensions" for my oldest 2 for this year. We read the first lesson and they did simple notebook pages (drawing and a sentence or two). We are also doing Apologia Botany so they worked on their notebooks for that. For my 1st grader, Beyond is plenty, so I'm not worried about having him sit in on MOH and Botany (he can if he wants to though).
My biggest challenge is going to be the routine. I have a beautiful routine all typed up, and it quickly became apparent that it needs to be totally reworked! With this many children all working at different levels and different speeds, it's hard to figure out what is going to work for us. But the good news is that we started school at about 8:30 this morning, and were done by about 1:30 (with a 30 minute break for lunch).
Tomorrow is a field trip day- we get to see an alligator at the library!
