Sunday, February 12, 2012

Homeschooling perks!

Hi everyone. I am busy today trying to pull my lessons together for next week. I guess it would be easier to do a pre-made curriculum, but I hate the idea of being tied down to workbooks for everything. We do use a workbook for math, but that's it. I think we will do a unit on winter this week, and "A" is still reading from his primer. We have a few letter blends to learn this week in reading.

Last week went well, we actually got ahead in reading, I am glad for that! I got a call last week from the UVA medical center asking if they could see "A" earlier due to a cancellation. I said yes, then went into a frenzy trying to pull together medical records. The trip was about four hours one way, so that of course took a whole day and then we needed the next day for some much needed rest!

We will have to catch up a little with math this week, but do I feel guilty? No, that is the joy of homeschooling! We are planning a visit to the lovely Pigeon Forge area for a stay at a indoor water park in the near future, I am sure I can work something educational into that, there are some wonderful educational opportunities in Pigeon Forge!

I am finding many "perks" to homeschooling! We can sleep in a extra hour and still get our lessons done by lunch! We can take awesome field trips to water parks! I don't have to feel guilty any more about missing school for medical appointments, and everything can be turned into a opportunity for learning!

Monday, February 6, 2012

Another Magnificent Monday!

It is so unusual to be excited about Mondays, but I am now. Things have changed so much since I started homeschooling "A", even baby brother  seems happier, I think a lot of stress and anxiety has been removed from our household. "A" wakes up ready to do his school work, he seems like he is having fun.
Two weeks ago I could barely get him to put three sounds together to make a word and today he read word's like John, look, and that. The reading curriculum we are using seems to be working! So far math is going good, I started him at the beginning of the Kindergarten Horizons math workbook,  it is a lot of review for him but he is flying through it, doing several lessons a day. I am sure it will slow down a little when we get into some of the harder concepts. We ended our lessons today with our unit study, "Rocking Robots" . Alex is enjoying learning about all the things robots can do, especially the fact that they have been to Mars! In today's unit study we also talked about the Solar system.  We have had a great start to the week and we are both pleased!




Saturday, February 4, 2012

And the journey begins....

We have been homeschooling for about two weeks now. Things are starting to fall into place. We took it slow for the first couple of weeks, so we could both get used to the change. Homeschooling is pretty awesome. I am surprised that A does his lessons so well with minimum fuss. We have been concentrating mainly on reading and math for the past two weeks, and we have read a few books from the library for science and history, we have learned about George Washington in history and about shadows in science. We also started reading "Moby Dick".

 During the past two weeks we have worked on reading skills and phonics, and we have reviewed in math. We enjoyed morning story time at our local library last Tuesday and we were able to meet a local home school family for lunch one day!

 We got our new Horizons math book and the Pecci reading series in the mail last week so we are ready to take off. I am waiting on science, social studies, and bible.  I have also decided to do some unit studies. I downloaded a few from Unit Studies by Amanda Bennet and I let A choose which one he wants to do next week! He chose a unit about Robots! I am looking forward to a fun week next week, one full of learning! 


My little Mr. Smarty pants! 

Computer time! 


Finished with lessons and playing his Wii...