Homeschool Dreams

So we started our new school year January 14th. A week later than I planned but that’s life, eh?

So naturally life decided to be a bit more challenging – husband was sick, then our second week of school the munchkin was sick. Naturally, now I’m sick. My husband’s, I think, was a virus. Boobear seems to have been more the result of the insane weather we were having (60 one day, 30 the next, really?!) and mine is a lovely sinus infection. Oh yeah.

Even so, we managed to get some lessons done. Pictures are all from the first week because Boobear ended up sick the second and our third week just started. He spent much of his school day today working through lessons on Time4Learning and watching shows about dinosaurs. Hey, that’s educational!

We’re doing school in six week chunks with about a week off in between. This way Boobear gets the routine he seems to thrive on but there’s still a break in there for other things. First six weeks is simply getting into routine and used to school work: Confessions of a Homeschooler’s Letter of the Week PreK curriculum. It actually may be a bit too easy for him but I am finding some funny little gaps. In other areas he’s way ahead of where I expected.

I’m never going to get him pinned down. Just keeping up is proving to be hard enough!

At our second six weeks we’ll be adding in Elemental Science’s Exploring Science. I’m guessing the experiment kit I ordered will be here about that time as well, which is perfect. I like having everything in one place and no searching for it or rushing to the store for something (especially difficult if you’re not able to drive!). Around the same time we’ll start Confession of a Homeschooler’s Road Trip USA, a nice history and geography course. Naturally we’ll do the animal study that is included for free with it.

As we go on, we’ll also add in the K4 curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

Seem like a lot? No worries – I’m being careful not to overload him and he’s welcome at any time to say when he’s had enough. And he does. Plus, the activities are short, sweet, and fun. I’m keeping some of them in a file folder for him to pull out and he does pull them out again to play with. We also are reading lots of books that go along with the letter of the week as well as anything else that catches his fancy, watching fun educational shows, playing lots of games, and when the weather is nice we’ll be outside hunting for bugs and watching for little animals again.

He also loves his rabbit trails. So far we’ve had an unexpected venture into space exploration, learned all about snails due to adding a mystery snail to the fish tank, and lots of studying of dinosaurs. Plus we’ve learned about pirates, our letter sounds, and had some fun cooking.

Here’s some pictures of our first week. Hopefully I’ll be able to get pictures of coming activities!

We started with A. Here’s a handwriting practice and coloring sheet. He got rewarded for trying hard with the handwriting with a foam sticker. Great for motivation!

The intent is to make an ABC binder. So far we’ve go the cover since we didn’t get to those crafts with people being sick. But with all the ABC books out there, I’m not sure we will.

Here we were practicing spelling and letter sounds with the word apple. He was to place the wooden discs with the right upper or lowercase letters onto the paper.

The wooden discs are just 1 inch discs I found on Amazon that I wrote the upper and lower case letters on with a Sharpie. We have 2 sets of the alphabet plus a few extra common letters, like E.

We had a great time practicing sounds – he’d purposely put the wrong letter just have me help him sound it out. Good practice.

Our fine motor activity/art project. We cut out a tree and apples then glued the apples on. I did the tree; he did the apples.

Adding the apples to the tree. This part he wanted no help with.

And it’s finished! He actually took this picture. I let him pick a piece of construction paper for the background and he said it’d be prettiest on black.

Math activity – put the right number card on the right number of seeds. He had a surprisingly hard time with this – and not just because the lamination made the pages curl.

He got the hang of it though. He seemed to have trouble understanding he needed to count seeds, not the apples.

We had these cards everywhere – floor, blanket, table, wherever. But it got done and he was pleased with himself when he finished.

End of the week we read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and add our weekly letter to the coconut tree I made. For some reason the first 2 weeks letters are floating by the tree – no idea why he doesn’t want to put them on there.

And that was our first week of our new school year. Each week has similar activities but there’s a good variety. It really is probably a bit too easy for him but it’s a nice way for me to see what he’s missing and where he really is (so far, assessment tests are putting him in kindergarten, but I’m not sure on that). And it gives us routine. I’m finding the more we slowly challenge Boobear, the better he’s doing. He’s already bugging us to go ahead and start using the Road Trip and is constantly sneaking the atlas upstairs to his room and if not that then the Elemental Science experiment book. I have a feeling it’ll be a hit.

Have you started school back yet and how’s that going for you?

Related posts:

1. Christmas Countdown
2. Fine Motor: Glitter Dots
3. Alphabet Book

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