Homeschool Week Five

Those first couple of weeks of school were just plain hard. I had my moments, to be sure (and during which I frantically email my elementary school teacher friends and they talk me down :o). Now school is a welcome challenge for me. I love my second (third?) career as a teacher at home and though it still is hard (believe me) it's really fantastic too. I get to watch my baby develop these skills right before my eyes. It's just awesome and we're really hitting a groove and a routine.

I want to do this for every week of school, but it just hasn't happened yet. For this week though, here were some highlights.

We packed meals for the backpack meal program at our church. I'm LOVING the fact that I can teach my daughter whatever I want (which is true if she went to public school as well, but we have so much more time for it). We made a list, went to the store, added up the cost of the groceries, paid for them and then sorted and packed the bags. These bags will feed six kids who receive free or reduced lunches from community around our church. Good service and lots of lessons learned! Yay!

 

We continue to work hard on sight words. Miss L has declared that her favorite thing to do "at school" is to do yarn letters. It's just another way we can practice spelling without having to always be writing. Woop woop!

 

...and mister W just cannot be left out. On Sundays as I usually make my lesson plans I plan two or three things for him to do (and try to include him in our art projects too). He loves sitting and working and I love that he has something that makes him feel so big and proud.

We made trees using handprints as the stump and branches of the tree. Mister W is trying to make his hands fit the tree here.

 

Then we added leaves and colored them and then I put dots of glue and mister W glued pom pom "apples" on the trees for fine motor practice (and you can see we had apples on our minds and and our table!).

Homeschool - Mister W

I am a member of a local homeschooling group. We aren't very regular attendees at group meetings at this point, but I do like that I can ask questions to the group. 

In this group there are lots of moms who homeschool all of their children, preschool and up. It just never occurred to me to homeschool my preschool aged child. Mister W is actually too young to attend preschool in the fall since his birthday isn't until February so I'm making plans to do some lessons with him as well. For now his subjects are going to be letters, numbers, colors, fine motor skills, bible, art and music. I figure those things will change as we get into our routine of school and I'm guessing that he won't do his lessons every day. Since it's summer we aren't doing much formal stuff, but mister W loves to sit with his mama and work on his "lessons" anyway. This day we worked on stringing these car beads on string. I'm impressed and how hard he works at this and I hope he is always so eager! May 11, 2012.