1 week homeschool

Our first full week homeschooling went well! It wasn't "perfect" by any means, but is anything that has to do with parenting or life? I think not :) One big thing I learned was that 3 hours of school a day is WAY too long! We can accomplish everything we need to accomplish in a good solid hour and then a review and craft 1/2 hour after lunch. I also learned that Owen pays attention for about 15 minutes. And the rest of the time is trying to keep him busy (with busy stations, "intentional play") so I can work with Eliana. For now our home-school time looks something like this:

Day of the week
Weather
Bible verse/prayer
Colors and Color of the Day
Shapes and Shape of the Day
Counting to 20 - and this week skip counting by 2's
Writing - the letter of the day, a sight word with letter of the day, name, color of the day, and a few numbers
A Craft - this week we did cards to people we love, a first commandment art page, and cut and glue picture
Personal - we covered kindness, how to ask a question, everyday manners, and calling women and men Mr. and Miss
Then we review our Classical Conversation work which consists of - Acts and Facts, English, Latin, Science, History, And Geography.

This week our Geography was the Fertile Crescent on the edge of Africa, so we also talked about the nation of Africa, Burkina Faso (where we have done mission work and have mission friends), Ethiopia (where their next brother or sister will be from), and looked at the map of America and pointed out Virginia (where we live), Kansas (where our family lives), and Missouri (where our friends live and we use to live)

That was the bulk of our week! We also include a Library visit each week and will eventually start some regular field trips each week. I would like to take them to places where they can see others in their jobs, like fireman, chef, dr, etc...

Here are a few pics from our week:

Eliana doing her shapes and Owen doing his "work"

working together to separate colors

pom poms are one of our new "busy stations" to separate colors, make patterns, and fill in printed worksheets

This is Owen's favorite right now. He loves to string the beads on the pipe cleaners, and for Eliana I make patterns and she strings them on to continue the pattern.

Also since our last blog post talking about the why we chose homeschooling for this year we have adjusted our goals a bit. Thanks to my step mom who is the Principal at a Christian school we were able to look at their age goals and added a few things to our list! To achieve our goals we are combining the CC curriculum with our own material we find via the web that will help teach the goals we have set. If you are interested in any of these sites I have listed a few of them below.

Overall we had a great first week and I am looking forward to more weeks to come!

OH.... but WAIT... before I leave you I should say this... Homeschooling is WAY harder then I thought it would be! I am convinced it would be WAY easier to take Eliana and Owen to school! I have to make sure I stay consistently motivated to "do school" and really challenge them and have them apply themselves! So before I leave this post too fluffy I just needed to be transparent and say that!!! Ok thanks :) ha ha

My current favorite homeschool helping websites-


http://www.homeschoolcreations.net/

http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.com/ForTots.html

http://www.supermommoments.com/category/printables/worksheets/

And of coarse pinterest - here is the link to my homeschool board

If you are considering doing some homeschooling or have some great websites please share in the comments!!!

Prayers and Blessings - Dawn