Homeschool

Hmm... homeschool....

Dictionary (.com of course) definition of homeschool

1. to teach (one's children) at home instead of sending them to school. verb (used with object)

I homeschool my children.

2. to educate one's children at home. verb (used without object) 

We homeschool.

3. a school set up in the home. noun

Our homeschool is a very disorganized room.

 

My definition......

1. the most stressful version of parenting

2. the most rewarding version of parenting

 

Now, we can argue about my definition till the cows come home, but that is MY definition, for me it is both stressful and rewarding. I know there are plenty of people out there that find their way of parenting perfectly rewarding and that's GREAT! I think any version of parenting where you can feel good about your role in your child's life is perfect!

 

For me, I love teaching my children about subjects that we enjoy. I hate the need to be organized. I love answering their questions about everything under the sun. I hate answering 5 million questions a day. I love watching their eyes light up when I introduce something that surprises them, especially science experiments. I hate cleaning up the constant mess that comes with having three small children who are learning and making memories.

 

My grandmother asked me last year if I had Tamarin enrolled in Kindergarten yet. I told her I was going to homeschool and she asked "Really? Are you sure? What about you?" My grandmother obviously knows me very well. I am incredibly disorganized. I am a spontaneous person who likes to get up, go do, whenever I want to. Homeschooling is a challenge for me. Last year I started a very loose pre-k self created curriculum for my oldest. We had a lot of life issues pop up and school went to the back burner while I dealt with health issues, selling our home, moving, renovating, etc. While I was far from organized about it I discovered teaching and learning still happened. While being organized can make you feel better about the homeschool experience it is not an all or nothing situation. We can still learn without a formal school setting.

 

We started our official school year last week. I pulled up my state's expectations for Kindergarten and 1st grade. My 6 year old meets 80% of the expectations for a child leaving kindergarten, the most important thing we are lacking is the ability to read independently. I read to my children daily, but she gets frustrated when I encourage her to read. She picks out a letter from the word and begins throwing me words with that letter in it or she paraphrases from the pictures what the sentence would say. We will be spending most of our school year focusing on reading so I decided we should consider her a kindergartner. She just turned 6 and I'm not in any kind of contest. I find it funny when parents brag about their kid can do this and do that. It's not a contest people, you're not going to get the all time parent award because your kid can read, quote verses, spell or has memorized the periodic table at the age of 3. Sorry.... I'm just not into competitive parenting... I believe kids need to learn at their own pace and be allowed time to pursue what interests them..... tangent rant finished....

 

Anyway for week two of Tamarin's Kindergarten and Lemur's Pre-K I managed to sit down and scribble out a plan:

 

Everyday

• circle time with singing, poetry, finger plays, etc. This will be our first week for this. It's not quite my style to have an official beginning ceremony to the day, but I'll try it.....
• write month, day, day of week, and time in journal
• write a sentence (My favorite, I like, It makes me happy when, Today I am, My cat, When I am, etc).
• Continue building sight words, pick out two or three and work on them all week (magnets, stickers, yarn, writing, draw in the dirt, etc)
• read picture books till they get bored, for this week I have some plant and moon books we will be reading as well
• Read a chapter from a big book with Tamarin. Right now we are working on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
• Start a bean sprout and then draw progress in journal daily. Bean sprout in a CD case, Dirtless bean sprout

Monday

• Collect things for Fall season table
• Decorate September in the calender. A suggestion from oak meadow curriculum. Help them to draw the theme of every month to help with memorizing months of the year.
• Draw an A sheet. This is something I had a lot of success with last year for Tamarin. Last year I used our dry erase board. This year I bought a large drawing pad from amazon so I can keep the result instead of erasing it and starting over for the next letter. Draw the letter and then let them help you come up with words that start with A, write the word, draw a picture beside it. Then you can use the ideas on the sheet to tell or write a silly story. Last year we told a silly story about Anna the acrobat who lost her apples to an alligator. She recruited the ants to help her on her adventure.

• Moon - one of the science experiment books (pg6) I've picked up has a hands on example (involving a flashlight and an orange) why the moon changes shape through the month. We are going to start charting the moon phases (something encouraged in the oak meadow curriculum) I thought this would be a good thing to help with understanding why. I bought this whole line of experiment books and seem to have misplaced all but this one book during the move :(
• Encourage Tamarin to read two of the BOB books. VERY simple early readers that I picked up at Lakeshore. She read 4 of them with minimal help on Friday so I am very excited about this.

Tuesday

• Read both A Stories (from the oak meadow kinder and 1st curriculum this is mostly for my 4 year old starting pre-K, but Tamarin will enjoy the stories anyway) 
• Help them write a story about their favorite thing from the summer, turn it into a little book.

• Decorate October in the calender. We are going to be counting down to Halloween so we'll go ahead and get October done now.

• Music: piano (We left our piano teacher behind when we moved, but I'm hoping to use the same book to teach the basics myself till we find a new teacher)

• Math gnomes (math stories from oak meadow 1st grade curriculum)

Wednesday

• Fall craft TBD (need some pinterest time :p) Probably something from here.

• Bake a pie and some bread for poor daddy getting dental work done today

• Condensation - going to do a few experiments showing how condensation works and show gas/liquid/solid, which we have talked about over the last few weeks and Tamarin is very curious about.

• Flower Press - Tamarin asked me what a stem was on a flower, so we will press a flower and label

• Sight word game - picked this bingo type game up at Lakeshore. We'll see if she's into it.

• Encourage Tamarin to read two of the BOB books

Thursday

• Make leaf imprints, not sure yet if I'm going to be making stepping stones or just rubbings. Depends on if I can get organized enough to do stepping stones. Knowing me it'll probably just be rubbings :p Or maybe let the girls make salt dough leaves and they can push them into it for the design.... Or maybe use this porcelain recipe.
• Draw a 1 Sheet. Saw this on pinterest and thought it would be a good idea to start, very similar to the A sheet I did last year.

• Music: recorder (something encouraged in the oak meadow 1st grade curriculum.... shoot me NOW, I hate recorders......)

• Math gnomes (wrap up the intro math gnome story)

• Sewing - Tamarin desperately wants to sew something, so I picked up an easy dress pattern and we will attempt to sew! Scary since I am not a very good seamstress.....

Friday

• Encourage Tamarin to read two of the BOB books

• Sewing - continue project from previous day

Whatever doesn't happen during the week will be pushed to Friday. This week I have doctor appointments on Tuesday and Thursday so we'll see what gets done! On one hand I feel like this is too much, on the other it feels like not enough......

Tamarin also has soccer practice on Tuesday and Thursday evening, new league, new team, I sure hope we all get along! Lemur should be starting practice too, but they are missing a coach.... If I wasn't so big right now I'd hop on it, maybe in the spring.

If you want to know more about this Oak Meadow I keep mentioning, their site is here. There is also a yahoo group where you can buy their books second hand.

Here's a couple of activities I hope to do for fun and for Howler this week:

Kitchen puzzle

Bubble painting