Homeschooling is a Journey

It occurred to me that although I many times ask, via FB and Twitter, what others do for homeschooling, I never really say what we are doing now. So, I am sharing today. Let me start off my saying that I am making the decision to homeschool year round, and to homeschool on most days of the week. Yes, there are some traditional school days that we don't homeschool, but we also don't take off the holidays, teacher planning days, etc that public schools take. I am staying Common Core aligned (a teacher friend sent me some great CC aligned assessments), so that if they return to public school I know that they will at least be on grade level.

Here's a typical day of homeschooling for us (our kids are preschool/pre-k, and K):

1. Educational TV such as Sesame Street, Magic School Bus, Wild Kratt's, etc-I know that some people are 100% TV watching, but we are not. Both of our kids learn very well through TV shows, and they enjoy them. The TV is usually on while I am making breakfast and during breakfast; sometimes even during handwriting/coloring practice. I especially enjoy how they ask questions during and after the tv shows, because it gives me ideas on more subjects for them to study.

2. Online work such as Teach Your Monster to Read, and ABCMouse-I love both of these websites and so do the kids. Monster is focused on reading, ABCMouse is a complete CC aligned curriculum for K, and it has curriculum from preschool-preK as well for our son (he has already completed Level 1 preschool). With both sites, the kids learn from games, worksheets, songs, etc. ABCMouse also has a separate "fun" area, as well as an area for parents to print off worksheets, and other learning areas for the kids to explore. Seriously, this site is awesome and worth the money.

I also use random websites for Science, such as Brain Pop, jr (the free stuff), National Geographic, and Science4Us (the free stuff).

3. Online apps-Bella, our 6 yr old uses Lexia/Rosetta Stone for homeschoolers to teach reading. As you can tell, I place great importance on learning to read. The websites are fun and great, but Lexia teaches some more difficult areas in reading and understanding. Bella has been diagnosed with expressive receptive speech delay in the past, so we have come to understand that she requires many different ways of learning, especially reading. The combo of Monster, ABC, and Lexia seems to be working.

We also use Read to Me, a Kindle app, to help both of them with reading/word recognition. This is a FREE app that delivers a new book to my Kindle everyday. The best part is that the app reads the book to you, while showing the words and highlighting them as they are read. The kids LOVE this and "read" their new book every night before I tuck them in bed.

4. Worksheets-Some of these I have gotten from friends, websites (teacherspayteachers), but some of the handwriting practice I just make up myself.

5. Flashcards and board games-Boggle, jr is AWESOME for teaching letters and short words. Chutes and Ladders is great for teaching numbers. And really any board game teaches patience, manners, taking turns, and counting. We are also getting Clue, Jr to work with reasoning, solving problems, and using clues.

6. Everyday life-You can really learn all day long, in every setting. They learn the importance of exercise through going to CrossFit with us. We talk about money and budgeting while shopping, especially when they want something and we talk about making choices between wants and needs. At the grocery store, we talk about healthy food choices and why it's important to eat healthy food.

So there you have it, that's our homeschooling in a nut shell. We don't do all of those every single day, but we do at least 4 of them a day. Oh, and of course the kids get outside play everyday (weather permitting); i read them a book at night (after Read to Me); and I am working to find some cheap, easy art projects for them to do.

Homeschool Day 1

I really wanted to come up with a clever title for this, but it's almost 14:00 and I am just now sitting down for lunch because I am exhausted. I love it, though. I feel like quitting my job outside the home was the best decision for us right now, no matter how stressful it is financially.

My goal was always to start homeschooling the day after Labor Day but I'd hoped that I'd have the Connections Academy curriculum by now. Due to paperwork issues, B just got 100% enrolled today, so we don't have the materials yet; so today we were on our own :) Since the kids are very close to the same level academically, today was pretty easy and fun. I had downloaded several educational apps on my Kindle, so we read some online books, did numbers games, and did matching games. Then the kids rode their bikes for 35 minutes while i walked with them. B wasn't too sure about the whole school thing at first (she HATED regular school & was very stressed), but when she realized that it was fun, she was all in! B is also starting soccer tonight, so she will get to meet friends and interact with more kids which makes us both happy.

One of the things that I like about homeschooling is the flexibility, which is about to become very important to me. Our schedule is already going to be busy with homeschool, soccer, play dates (through the local homeschooling group), CrossFit (including my intern duties) and church, and it's only going to get worse when i have shoulder surgery on the 16th of this month. Yes, I am that crazy woman who is homeschooling 2 kids, taking care of 7 pets, and getting shoulder surgery. Yes, my husband will be helping some for the first week, but he also has a job in which he cannot take off a lot of time.  Hopefully I will feel okay enough to blog about my shoulder surgery.

Okay, so now I need to get ready to take the kids to the grocery store and shopping for soccer stuff for tonight. I really think I might need a hot bath tonight.