Week One!!

So we have one week of Homeschooling under our belt and I must say, it's going GREAT! It started off a little rocky as we were all trying to get used to the routine. Jonathan had no idea of what to expect and wasn't really happy when I took him away from 'playing' to do some school work, but I learned quickly how to do that smoothly and he learned quickly that it doesn't take much time at all - then he's back to playing! =)

This week, with our FIAR curriculum, we rowed the book, Night of the Moonjellies by Mark Shasha. I saw first-hand this week, how great it is to RE-READ the same book for 5 days in a row. It was amazing how Jonathan picked up on little details each time!

Along with the story, we read lots of other books about ocean animals. I found some sea glass on eBay (it talks about sea glass in the book) and a fake jellyfish for the boys to play with.

I also made up a Sensory Bin with aquarium rock and lots of little ocean animals (from Oriental Trading). This was a GREAT activity

for Jonathan to learn what the different animals are! I caught him "swimming" the animals in the ocean on our wall map. He knew where Maine was (the setting of our FIAR book)! YAY!

Our Math U See Curriculum has been great. Right now it's just a lot of review for Jonathan and he's basically just learning how to use the math blocks to figure out problems. We like it though! The lessons are very easy to understand and very quick!

We even took advantage of one day that was a beautiful 80 degrees outside!

Learning about money... (he sorted and named the coins)

This was a lesson from FIAR since the boy in the book helped his grandmother at her restaurant.

We started Handwriting Without Tears. It's been going well. For a boy who hates writing/coloring/drawing of any kind, he doesn't complain too much about these lessons. It helps that there are so many components for teaching handwriting and each lesson moves pretty quickly.

By the end of the week, we had a routine down and Jonathan was actually 'excited' about school! He loved learning about the ocean animals and we took a little field trip to Chicago to visit Shedd Aquarium. We won't end each week with a trip like this, but it was a fun family outing and a nice 'kickstart' to our school year!!

I'm HOPING to blog about our schooling each week. We'll see if that actually happens =). I would love to use this as a reminder each year of what we've done and how it all worked.

Week 2 Book - The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack

Mid-summer update

We're enjoying a very laid-back summer! I wasn't sure how I was going to handle homeschooling during the summertime...I tried doing a little here and there, but quickly found out that is not how I roll! I need consistency, organization, and definite plans. It was just too crazy trying to do it 'here and there' as time allowed. So I scrapped the idea of summer schooling and decided we will start full-force in mid-August. I'd like to see us do a year-round schooling approach with more 'relaxed' summers and breaks scattered throughout the year. I just don't know what will work for us at this point. I'm so glad that I have this "Kindergarten year" with Jonathan to sort of 'test the waters'!! I have done some planning already and have my Homeschool Binder all set up and ready to go! I have a rough draft of what units we will cover each week throughout the year. It's very ROUGH though as I'm sure we'll take spontaneous breaks and may cover units quicker than others. At least I have my head wrapped around some sort of yearly plan! That's all I wanted at this point.

As for our family time this summer, we have enjoyed being outside A LOT!!! Max will bring me his shoes and lead me to the door as soon as he wakes up! :-) We don't have a lot of yard space, but we do have MILES of sidewalks in our neighborhood. We're also EXTREMELY blessed to have some WONDERFUL neighbors on our street! Jonathan has 4 little buddies that he plays with quite regularly and they are all 4-6 years old. SO perfect!!! The moms and I all get along really well. It is such a huge blessing to have these friendships close by.

We just got back from a great little mini-vacation to Arkansas. We visited with Josh's extended family and it was a GREAT time. Not exactly as 'relaxing' as we had hoped, but it's always great to get together with family that we don't see very often. Josh had Aunts, Uncles, and cousins from California, Kansas, Arizona, and Texas!! We celebrated his Grandparent's 60th anniversary while we were all there. Unfortunately, Jonathan developed a cough and low-grade fever down

there. He didn't let it slow him down too much, so we just kept on going and giving tylenol as needed. After 5 days of it and no sign of it going away, I took him to the doctor the day after we got home. Too my SHOCK, he was diagnosed with pneumonia!! So now we are doing breathing treatments several times a day, and he's on two different antibiotics :-(. He's doing okay though- the hardest part is keeping him entertained INDOORS!

Until next time...!

Finally

Well, school is officially OUT for the summer, and this is the first year that I can say I'm not going back! :-) I'm excited, nervous, happy, sad, and overwhelmed all at the same time. I know without a doubt that this is exactly where God wants me, but I can't help but wonder if I'll do it right!

I've been thinking for the past few weeks about our summer schedule. I don't feel like we're ready to dive right into a normal schooling routine yet, but I DO want a routine. If we don't have a daily routine, Jonathan will spend all day asking me if he can go outside, or if he can watch TV, or if he can go outside, or complain that he's bored. :-) We. must. have. routine. So that's what I'm working on now. I definitely want him to have LOTS of free time to play with his neighbor friends, but I want some structure too. I would like our daily activities to include: scripture memory work, read aloud (using a FIAR book), quick math, quick phonics, chapter book read aloud, and of course free time. I may be trying to cram too much in. That seems like a lot, but maybe we'll stagger different things every other day. I really love the idea of 'year-round school', but I'm not sure how well it will work for our family. In a couple weeks, Jonathan is going to my parents for the whole week. Then a few weeks after that, we'll all be going to Arkansas to visit family for several days. Then there's VBS week just a couple weeks later. We need a schedule, but a flexible one! Although that's one of the great things about homeschooling - a schedule that fits OUR needs :-). We'll see how it goes.

I really wish I knew how to personalize this site better. I don't like this layout/template. Ahh well...I'll work on it.

So in future homeschooling news...I went ahead an purchased Handwriting without Tears. I wasn't going to get a formal handwriting curric, but after helping Jonathan with his valentines a couple weeks ago, I decided it was a M-U-S-T! Personally, I feel like handwriting is developmental and although kids must be 'taught' how to form letters, their ability to do so in the correct way is based on their developmental fine motor abilities. Jonathan knows his letters and numbers with no problem, but his writing is terrible. However, I've said before that Jonathan does NOT like writing/drawing/coloring of any sort =(. So I want to tread lightly in the area of 'handwriting'. I don't want him to dread it, but I do want him to learn how to write correctly. HWT looks like it was made just for us. I think spending just a few minutes a day (or every other day) will help.

I've also decided that I want to school year-round. I live on a schedule and consistency, so that's how I want my house to run. Sure we may take breaks here and there, but for the most part I want consistent days. I've put together a rough schedule of our days. Basically doing Bible, FIAR, and reading instruction every day. Then alternating Math u See and HWT each day. That's my thoughts for now, but I fully expect to revise this as we get going. My "plans" are hardly ever the final product! I really want to be laid back this first year of schooling, but I don't want to underestimate Jonathan's abilities, so I wanted to be prepared with adequate curriculum. I may end up scrapping half of it this year, and hold off until next year, and that's okay!

I think that for the most part, Jonathan is going to love being home schooled. One problem is that he has gone to "preschool" (at our church) 1/2 days for the past 2 years. He LOVES it there. The one thing that I'm afraid I'm going to constantly be battling is the "friends" issue. Anytime we talk about him being home schooled, he always ends up asking about his friends. "Where will his friends be?" "Who will he play with?" "Will he have a friend?" When we decided a while back to do this, I had no idea that Jonathan would be so worried about having friends!! Of course I tell him that he'll still have all his church friends, and we have tons of neighborhood kids (one in particular) that he plays with a lot. I guess it's because Jonathan has been to school - and he loves it being there with his friends, so he just doesn't understand why he has to be home without those friends.

Anyway, that's what I'm going to be dealing with. I'm praying that this will work itself out and he'll appreciate the opportunity to be home schooled and the reasons behind it. Jonathan wanting to be around "friends" is certainly NO reason to reconsider our decision!! That's one of the many reasons why we are keeping our kids HOME!

Our journey to homeschooling....

Well, here I go! This isn't my first time blogging. I had another blog for over 5 years over on Xanga, but that has gone by the wayside in the past year. I really love journaling. Actually, I love being able to look back on past events in our life--I don't necessarily love taking the time to sit down and document them all! I do want to keep track of our homeschooling efforts, so I hope to keep this a constant place for me to do that. A few months ago, I posted on my old blog the 'story' of us coming to the realization that I was going to quit my public school teaching job to stay home with our boys. Here is a copy of that post (Sept 13, 2010)....

I'M GOING TO BE A STAY AT HOME MOM!!!

Exciting, huh? It IS for me!! This is my last year of working. Josh and I have always talked about me staying home, but its just never worked out financially. As Jonathan gets closer and closer to going to Kindergarten, the issues that we've been avoiding are slowly starting to become a problem. I won't go into great detail, but childcare is big issue. J and Max go to a great babysitter, but she is not near where he will have to attend school. So we would have to find a different sitter for the boys (since Jonathan would need after school care). That stresses me out. Plus, I don't know a whole lot about our school district. I hear good things, but I don't know a lot. Since I'm a teacher, in a different district, I really would NEVER have the chance to participate in his education. I could never be a room mom or help at parties (because those SAME parties will be going on in my classroom!) and that just makes me sad. I want to be involved in the PTA, I want to know who his friends are (and their families), I want to be "that mom" who picks him up from school, and I want to be home with Max, cooking dinner, and keeping a somewhat clean house.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE teaching, but I also have a strong desire to be home with my children. I've always felt torn about that. I think that since me working was really a 'must' for us, God has always given me a 'desire' to teach. Now that I'll be staying home, I'm so excited and not even looking back! We are having to make huge sacrifices to make this possible. We have NEVER been a one-income family so this is going to mean big adjustments in our budget. We're already living on just Josh's income to help us get used to it, and it is NOT EASY!!! But we both know that this is exactly what I'm supposed to do, so we are bound and determined to make it
work.

There's more to this story though - About 6 months ago when Josh and I first started discussing the possibility of me staying home next year, he told me not to get all excited about it yet, because there were still some financial 'kinks' that he needed to work through, but of course - impatient me- did exactly that. I got my hopes and dreams all set on the fact that I had ONE more year of teaching! I was actually registered to take another Master's class this summer, but Josh told me to drop it since it looked like I would be able to quit, and there's no sense in me spending all that money on a class that really wasn't going to do me any good.

As the summer went on, I began to get this nagging feeling. Just something in the pit of my stomach that felt like something was missing. I was so excited at the thought of being a SAHM, but for some reason I was not completely satisfied. At first I couldn't pinpoint it, but when I found myself doing internet searches on Home Schooling, I began to figure out what was going on. The Holy Spirit was convicting me.

I'm not going to deny it - I fought it. I really did. I gave myself and God every excuse for why I should NOT homeschool. I *knew* homeschoolers growing up, and they were WEIRD. They were sheltered, and dressed strange, and didn't know what a curling iron was. It wasn't until I met Josh in college that I found out that homeschooling didn't mean you had to be weird. JOSH was homeschooled!!!! Okay, so he may be a little weird, but for the most part he doesn't fit the typical 'home-schooler stereotype'.

I will say that in terms of schooling our children, 'homeschooling' has always been an option for us. But that's all its been in my mind, an OPTION. I don't think I ever really believed that we would do it. I figured we'd send our kids to a private school or possibly a 'good' public school. Well, we are not impressed with any of the private schools here and while public school still was an 'option' for us, I just got to thinking.....Why would I want to have some stranger teach my children, when I know I can do it? Why would I want to put my 5-year old in a classroom with 20+ other kids and just 'hope' that he will get the learning experiences that he needs? Why would I want other kids to introduce things to my child that I would NEVER want him to hear or learn about (or at least wanted to tell him myself)?

I'm not going to say that I battled this decision all summer. I did not. Even though I questioned it, I KNEW pretty quickly that this is what we were going to do. Especially after I mentioned it to Josh and he quickly said that he was ALL FOR IT!! He just never wanted to pressure me about it because ultimately I will be the one doing all of the work! What a sweet guy. But he was thrilled when I told him I was considering it. After that I pretty much knew it was a done deal. I began researching different curriculum options and what style I was wanting to go with. I still have a STACK of books on my nightstand to read. I'm literally swimming in homeschooling resources. I love it though and I get more excited every DAY about the thought of raising our children in the admonition of the Lord and teaching them the things that they TRULY need to know to be successful, God-fearing men!

I wrote that several months ago, but I'm thrilled now to say that last week I "officially" resigned from my Kindergarten position at school. I'll miss the wonderful people I worked with there, but I am head-over-heels excited about staying home full-time!

I've been immersing myself in curriculum for this next year. I knew going into this, that I did not want to push much next year. It's Jonathan's "kindergarten" year, but I really want it to be a FUN year for him as his first year at home. We will have PLENTY of time for learning, but I'm not going to sit and drill facts into his head all day. I've learned Jonathan's learning style already, so as I have been browsing curriculum, it doesn't take long for me to scrap it or save it. Jonathan LOATHES worksheets. He's an active learner. He LOVES books, but he also loves his Nintendo Wii =). He would rather sit and stare at the wall than be forced to color in a coloring book. He LOVES numbers. He is going to soar in math. He's going to hate 'handwriting'. I *think* he's going to be a quick reader (he has some good early reading skills already), but the trick will be getting him to CHOOSE to read.

Anyway, with that said...I have chosen the Five in a Row curriculum for our main study. I'm a Unit Study girl, so this appealed to me immediately. I love the great books they use, and the activities are endless. It seems to be very history/geography based- which is great.

I hesitated to get any sort of Math curriculum yet, but my gut says I should. Jonathan is ready for it. I'm considering Math U See.

Still trying to decide my reading strategy. I picked up a Phonics Pathways book, but I'm not completely sold on it yet. No reading/phonics program has really stuck out at me. I keep going back to the good ol' Charolette Mason method of reading...

WOW! My first post was pretty lengthy! =)