Homeschooling...How It's Going

Some people have been asking me about how homeschooling is going so this blog entry is for you. :)

It's been going well. To be truthful, it was hard to get it into our schedule at first. I kept forgetting to have school time with her in the morning at our designated time. It's taken a little while, but we've finally got it down. We only do 30 minutes of structed time in the morning (letters, numbers, theme for the week, etc.) and then I find "teachable moments" throughout the day. I've finally figured out how to work our local public library system and that's helped a lot. We're able to reserve and check out books pertaining to our theme of the week, and if there's a book I need from another library, they ship it over to ours and I can pick it up. Good stuff.

Some of the things we have planned for this year are:
- Bible verse for the week
- Letter of the week
- Beginning letter sounds
- Writing uppercase letters
- Lots of different types of artwork
- Music classes (check out Music With Mar. online - google it)
- Nursery rhymes
- The 10 Commandments
- The Fruits of the Spirit
- Spanish numbers and words/phrases
- Science experiments
- Hands-on counting games
- Lots of field trips :)

This week, we are learning about healthy foods, unhealthy foods and exercize. I took two pieces of paper and put the words "healthy foods" and "unhealthy foods" on them (along with smiley and frowny faces so she could "read" it) and let her glue on magazine pictures of the foods onto their correct papers. We also rented a DVD from the library (Sesame Street's Food, Water and Exercize). I also found (online) a neat "Go Fish" game with healthy foods.

Here's Avonlea with her "Letter of the Week Box" where we have a letter hunt every Monday, finding things around the house and yard starting with the letter of the week. This week was letter "C". We found cereal, a cup, a cat, (pretend) carrots, a pretend cucumber and a few other little things.