2/3 of the way through P4/5. . . and I have successfully finished one week as a stay at home homeschooling mom!
Core: We managed to maintain the pace that myself and my nanny had been completing each week. Still lots of fun readings in the mornings, including a daily Mother Goose rhyme (we have a lot of fun saying, “that’s silly”), a weekly Uncle Wiggly and art appreciation, and have started a new reader called Milly-Molly-Mandy, or MMM for short. Its lots of fun to read and a reminder of how the world seemed to be a lot simpler before all this ‘progress’, especially for children.
At bedtime, we finished up the Boxcar Children and started Wizard of Oz.
I also got to participate in calendar time and help more with the weekly bible verse. We’ve been doing “wake up worship” in the morning to get the kids out of bed and going. They really love saying “Good morning God/Jesus” at the top of their lungs.
LA1: H overlapped her last couple weeks of LAK with starting LA1. We’ve gotten through about 5 weeks now. I’m not trying to rush through it, but I am trying to make the girls all practice reading each day which keeps us on a pretty steady pace. We also picked up the library reading program last week so trying to keep track of the amount of reading as well. I’m pretty proud of all of them, they are doing much better with blending and have learned a good set of sight words. I think the fosters will be ready for 1st and Kinder in Aug when school starts up.
Math: Not doing much specifically for math. I pull out some math worksheets every now and then. We also did time telling, hours only, recently. I told them about the minutes but didn’t make them work any out. So throughout the week, we’ve been looking at the clock to try to figure out the time. I should probably do more counting throughout the day, counting by twos, fives, and tens, needs to be worked on.
Science: I think everyone would love to do some experiments, but I don’t have all the science books I need for the Science K kit that I have. I will probably go ahead and order a few of them for fill in times now that I know how our week looks.
SS: We finished up the Stories from Africa and last week, we read a book called the God’s Must Be Angry which I really liked which is based on a true story in Thailand. It was fun to find Thailand on the map and show them how far away it is.
According to our oldest, my current failing is that I don’t do crafts. I will probably have to come up with some ideas soon. The girls all did really great coloring sheets this week and did get to play with some beads on Saturday. . .
Ben: I’m letting Ben do his thing mostly. He still loves doing puzzles and playing with blocks. He has a fair amount of time playing dress up and kitchen and doctor and daddy with the babies which is all good imagination stuff. He’s been running around ‘fighting monsters’ with a toy sword. I ask him if he wants to do school and if he says yes we either do a sticker book that is supposed to help expand his vocabulary and has some fun search and find features or we do some preschool worksheets that are mostly coloring but fun to talk about. He likes drawing squigglies and then telling me what letter he drew so that is pretty cute. He probably participated 4 out of 5 days last week.
Remember, I homeschooled Brendan through some of Kinder, all of First and some of second. When you come visit, I’ll show you some of the things we used, if I can find them.
It’s funny that you were talking about Thailand last week – I was in Thailand last week!
What was the very first thing “school” wise you started with and at what age?
The first official thing we did was start Hannah on a preschool curriculum from a company called Sonlight when she turned 3. If you use this link it will be all of her ‘age 3’ posts and if you go to the bottom to the first one you can read about the curriculum: P3/4 Posts
Before she turned three, we just did lots of reading and playing and coloring and normal kid stuff. Even after she turned three, the curriculum was very light with mostly story reading and a few developmentally appropriate activities (most of these, we had already done like stack blocks or sort objects).
We’ll probably start Ben on the P3/4 when he turns 3 in Nov, but we should be done with it by the time J comes along if you wanted to borrow it. You can come over and look at it if you want or research it on the sonlight.com website. 🙂