When I created this blog, my original intention was to journal our school adventure. All I can say to that is oops! Hopefully, I can remember to jot down our journey a little better than I have in the last year. I find school to be such a natural extension of out lives that I often don't stop to write down how our days work.
Hudsyn practicing her two's. She has a hard time making them, so this day for math, we stopped and she filled the table with 2's. By the time she was done she had made great progress.
Nerf math.
I write numbers on the school cabinet, then call out math fact questions and the kids have to shoot the correct answer.
Hudsyn working on Reading Eggs and Kait researching a few things for a newspaper she has to create for school.
My very relaxed homeschool planner. I'm nearly done filling it out for next week.
For the longest time I have been puzzled as to what to do with all our thin paperback books. When I put them in a bookshelf they got hidden and no one read them. A while back I had seen rain gutter bookshelves on someone's blog, I filed the bookshelves in my mental filing system just in case we ever wanted to try them out. About a month ago, Chad installed them for me. Let me say I am in love. They encourage me to read to my littles more often. By that I mean they follow me around with their favorite books and ask me to read to them until I do!
Regular night of school. Disregard the bowl of Jelly Bellies and Pringle cans. I would never let my kids eat junk food during school. ;)
Craft time, super simple and everyone gets involved. I don't know where big sister is in this pic, but don't let her fool you. She loves craft time more than the little kids!
Finished product!
We have so much going on with school and so many people to school that it would be a challenge to manage everyone without a homeschool planner. Kait has a student planner that came with her boxed curriculum, and I have the matching instructors guide, same exact thing just different. ;) It gives her a day by day layout of exactly what needs to be done, right down to pages and paragraphs to be read. It has guides and appendices in the back. Not a stone is left unturned. It is so easy to manage, I love it. Since I didn't buy a boxed (all in one) curriculum for Tristin, Bella and Hudsyn I made my own planner. It's very basic but it functions just fine for how I use it. In the front of my planner I have several things that make my day easier. Mostly reference sheets, but also a routine for our school day. There are three different routines written out in there, right now we are on our daytime routine, but it can change to afternoon or even evening depending on Chad's work schedule. Our kids are fully adjusted to the constant schedule changes their Daddy's job brings. We try to spend time with Chad when he is home and work while he is working or sleeping from midnights. In my planner for the younger three kids, I make a weekly schedule. It's simply what needs to be done by the end of the week. There are days that we focus longer on math and then the next day skip math and focus on reading. As long as we get done by the end of the week what I have in my planner, we are good in my book. Even though we have a routine, it helps me to have a schedule in front of me....because once in a while I will forget a subject and then have to make it up the next day if I am not paying close enough attention to my planner.
We usually start our school day with arts and crafts, because I have tried calling my children to the school table when they already doing something (which is always). Even my girls who love school, are hard to pry away from their fun. When they know that we are doing a craft or art project they consider it equally, if not more fun than what they were originally doing and are excited to get to the table quickly. Then after we have all completed our projects, everyone seems a little more focused and we can move onto our school work. From there we move onto reading our Bible passage. Since we have turned our table into a chalkboard, we are able to use it to draw the Bible story we are reading. It basically reinforces learning and keeps little hands busy. We work on our memory verse and then whatever character quality we are working on. After we are done with that we move onto to reading and spelling. This year we are using All About Reading and All About Spelling. So far, I am very happy with both. After reading and spelling we move onto handwriting, of this we are using A Reason for Handwriting. We keep record of what we are thankful for in our gratitude journals. Then we work on math. Math is done in our workbooks, then we try to complete one lesson on timezattack, it's a math facts website set up a bit like a video game. Rarely does Bella let me get away with skipping Life of Fred, so we slide that in for math too. For science we are working on the human body, we are using Apologia. I like that there is a audio CD to read to your child the exact material that you would be reading. I am finding it a little bit dry. So, when we are too bored we switch to a science based unit study or lap book for a week or so. After we finish up all of our table work, I read to the kids. We like to focus on living books. I usually read a historic book, and then another book from our collection of beloved children's literature. I often spend an hour or two reading to them, they love it and beg for more. Out of all the things we do as a family, we all enjoy our time reading the most. It is one of my all time favorite ways to spend time with my kiddos.
