First day of boat school!

Hiding in several of the boxes waiting for us at Kate and Jim’s were all the materials for boat school! After picking those up and putting a plan together, we finally started 5th grade on Oestara on Monday, September 11th (photo above of the happy student with her bunny!)

Cecelia has been attending a French immersion school (The French American Academy in Jersey City) for the last three years. While I’d love to say we’re keeping up the French instruction, we are definitely not qualified for that! However, as we were preparing for boat school, her French and English teachers from 4th grade generously shared some recommendations and advice with us for Cecelia’s 5th grade year.

Ms. Sebti, her English teacher, suggested we look at the Evan-Moor instruction series, and we wound up going with that series for most subjects, but we stuck with Singapore Math, which is the math program Cecelia is familiar with from her time at the FAA. We are also currently reading The Trumpet of the Swan, The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963, and A Little History of the World. I have more books on tap for later in the year, but that’s what we’ve started with.

To try to maintain some of Cecelia’s French proficiency this year, we brought along a few workbooks suggested by Ms. Lucile, her French teacher, as well as some French novels and other media (movies and shows). I’m hopeful that when we visit some of the Caribbean islands where French is spoken, she’ll have the opportunity to interact in French a bit more!

Cecelia and I have been having fun figuring out a good rhythm for our school days. Most days we start just before 9 am with a good morning stretch (and coffee for Mama!), then work our way through math, vocabulary, language, reading comprehension, geography, and history, with a bit of science and citizenship thrown in a few days a week. Each day she has a writing assignment in her journal, usually having something to do with what we’ve studied that day, and most days she has practice worksheets for homework, and book chapters to read for the next day.

We’ve been at it for a couple of weeks now, and there have been a couple of days we have decided to push school from the morning to the afternoon, to accommodate other plans. There have also been some days we just can’t fit school time in (like when we’re on passage and I need to sleep when I’m off watch!) For those times, I’ve made sure she has additional practice work or a project to work on during the day we’re not having school.

My favorite part of school time so far has been when Cecelia is interested in learning about something and we get to go down a rabbit hole researching it. She wanted to know why the word “understand” is a compound word made up of “under” and “stand”–so we looked it up! It turns out the origin of “understand” is a bit of a mystery! On another day, she pulled out some diagrams of circuits that she drew in science class last year, and she and Patrick sat together and went through the key components. It’s pretty fun to let her take the lead.

I feel so lucky that we get to spend time learning with Cecelia this year. I am sure it will be an education for us all!