This is How We Homeschool. PT. 1

For me, one of the biggest perks of homeschooling is the flexibility of it. We don't HAVE to take off for Presidents Day or Spring break or parent teacher conferences or all of Summer. We can take days off as needed or when we plain just feel like it. 

Thursday's are typically grocery shopping/errand days around here. It's usually a rush to get home to put away all the groceries and get lunch on the table before nap time (for ALL of them), so no "school work" gets done then. But the thing is, even when we aren't doing "school" we are still learning. As we drive in the van we talk about highways and speed limits and the differences between cities and towns. We learn the names of the produce, and try and find things that start with A, B, C, etc.

They also learn how to behave and to politely interact with people in public. Whether it's responding to the checkout girl asking how old they are or the nice old man tickling the babies toes and telling me I have my hands full (which I never do; thank you grocery carts and baby slings!)

Dean's store, Rochester Appliance, is in the same plaza as one of the stores we go to every week. It's always fun to end our shopping day at daddy's shop. The boys can throw around a ball with dad and say hi to the fishies before we head home. 

Some days, when work isn't too crazy for Dean, I will drop off Will before I do my shopping, and he will work with daddy learning how to fix appliances. They will diagnose it, fix it and get it clean and ready to sell!

With a little help from daddy, he took pictures and posted ads on Craigslist. 

Together they have fixed and sold 3 machines! 

Their original plan was to use their profits (after repair costs and tithing) to buy a remote control car (or as the cool kids call it, an RC car), but with some persuasion they decided to buy a microscope instead!

They've had fun looking at hairs, salt, dead bugs and their favorite so far, dirty water from Lake Ontario!

I love that my kids aren't only learning academically, but great life skills as well!

Homeschooling :: 7 months In

We are 7 months into our homeschooling journey, and things are going great! Will is a little smartypants which has helped make this transition of becoming a teacher and a student much smoother than I had expected. Don't get me wrong. We still have our challenges (i.e. getting a 5 year old boy to sit still and concentrate and a mom who continually fails to have enough patience), but I am so thrilled with the progress we have had. 

Will finished his Kindergarten math book back in January. We went right into 1st grade math, and he has continued to fly through that too. No surprise, if you ask him what his favorite subject is, it's this.

He also completed his Kindergarten Letters and Sounds book last month. I would consider him a reader now and hearing him read is so much fun! Learning this crazy language with all it's silly "rule breakers" hasn't seemed to faze him at all.

I wanted to bring up this picture that I posted on Instagram last Fall, a few weeks into our school, year with this caption:

"One thing I want to be sure I pay attention to in our homeschooling journey is how each individual child learns best. There is a time and place for being proper, but if he wants to sit on the table (in his outfit of choice these days) to do his work then by all means I'll let him."

My husband saw this, and didn't fully understand what I was trying to say. There is for sure a time and place for structure and discipline in schooling our children. There are moments when Will standing on a chair or sitting on the table is just him goofing around and it becomes a distraction. But if, like in the picture, he is concentrating and completing his school work, while siting on the table, than great!

We continue to take things one day at a time. Some weeks are more productive than others. With some nicer weather coming our way I am excited to spend less time sitting at the table pencil in hand, and more time in the backyard digging in the dirt and reading books in the grass.

Kindergarten

Will started kindergarten yesterday! Apparently, I'm supposed to be all teary eyed and uber emotional at the fact that my first baby is almost 5 and starting school already. But, call me crazy, I am excited to see him grow up and experience these milestones!

I wish I could say that I have his school room area decked out with charts of ABC's and 123's, and a binder with a full schedule of the whole year planned out. But, I don't. Not yet, anyways. I do plan on creating a "schedule" of some sort eventually, and would like to create a nice little learning space for Will to have. But, he isn't the only one who will be learning this year. I will have to learn what works for him, and what doesn't. (And what works for me, and what doesn't!) We are just going to take this whole homeschooling thing one day at a time.

Any advise from you veteran home schoolers for this beginner mom?

T is for Teapop!

I posted before about beginning to teach Will how to read, and I am still working on it with him. He naturally and easily learned his ABC's through books, toys and TV shows, but what is really most important is learning the letter sounds. I knew it would be up to me to teach him that. Luckily I have a smarty pants on my hands, so it really didn't take much effort from me!

First, I got a cute notebook on clearance at Target.

 Then I wrote in the whole alphabet in big, bold letters. Both lower and uppercase.

I also wrote in some simple 3 letter words.

When we were first starting out I would work on it with him a few times throughout the day. Just a few minutes here and there. I wanted to teach him both the uppercase and lower case, and the sound of each letter. If he couldn't answer, I would give him the answer and we would move on to the next.

He now knows all the letter sounds, and can tell you a word or two that starts with that letter!

Here is a video to show you his skills. It's a bit long, but it's pretty stinkin' cute. Aaand he breaks out in song in the end, so you'll be glad you stuck with it.

The next thing I want to work on with him is learning to write his name!