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