First day back

Today was our first day home schooling in 2010 and it went really well.  The kids really enjoyed the Exploring Creation with Astronomy for their new science curriculum.  Tim (2nd grader) labeled 48 states from memory on the US map, again with no teaching or instruction involved, just daily blank map that he fills in from memory first, then fills in the rest using a key. For handwriting we are using two blank handwriting sheets, which I then put lines for him to copy, I just use proper sentences from the material we are working on.  Today was a list of the 4 middle colonies "New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware."  and text from science "The study of the universe is called astronomy."  The teaching across the grades is still a success.  Of course, we have to keep skill based subjects individual (math, language arts, etc) but everything is working out better than I expected.  Tori (5th grader) is really excelling with the new structure of learning.  Using Charlotte Mason's narration technique is helping her tremendously.  Tomorrow we begin a new character trait in our character development study, we will be focusing on consistency.