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Today all the public school kids went back to school. Since it was the first summer that we have totally taken off, I decided that it would be a good starting day for us too! Maybe a little bit of a crazy thing to do since we are leaving town tomorrow to head up to Canada for a wedding. There is nothing like having one day of school and then taking almost a week off! Talk about easing into things gradually. And hey, with no neighbour kids knocking on the door, we might as well be doing school!
I think the day went pretty well. We got off to a slower start than usual. I had a headache when I woke up so I slept in until 8:30 when Katie woke up. Jared and I got started around 10:00 and worked for an hour. We took a break and then worked for about another hour or so. After lunch we did some read alouds and then he did his independent work He knew that he had to get his work done by at least 4:00 so that he and Steven could play when Steven arrived home from school.
This year I haven't really set a schedule as far as what subject to do first. Today I just let him pick what he wanted to do next. If it continues to go well, I may just keep doing that all year. I had bought "The Home Schooler's Journal" a few months ago. It is set up with 5 days a page and you write in your lesson plans for each subject. Before we went to Michigan I did about 10 days of lesson planning. So everything that we need to do for the day is right there where Jared can see it. He picked the order and then we checked off when we completed each thing.
For all you homeschooling Moms out there, this is what we did today.
We started with history b/c that is his favorite! (we're studying American history this year mainly using resources from American Story 1 (Winter Promise) and Adventures in My Father's World (My Father's World). We read the first 19 pages of Wild West which focused on Native Americans. We did a huge unit on Native Americans this past spring, so a lot of this is review for him. We checked out a couple of Native American websites and then I started reading the book "Indian Captive" out loud to him. I just now realized that I forgot to do some timeline stuff with him. Ooops, I meant to do that later when we were all down in the basement (our timeline is in the basement), but I forgot. Oh well, another time...
Then we moved on to study "The Pledge of Allegience" and read a book about that.
Then it was math. We're going to start with time this year, so we just reviewed what we had done last year (telling time to the half and quarter hour).
Language Arts was last - his choice! We did the spelling pre-test for the first lesson of SpellWell A, then we did a lesson from "The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading" (continuing from last year) and we started a new vocabulary book - Wordly Wise. He didn't seem to overly enjoy that one, maybe it will get better as it goes along!
In the afternoon I read a bit more from "Indian Captive" and also read a few chapters from "Wendy and Brian and the hurt Puppy" to Jared and Laura. Then Jared did his homework, a spelling page,a couple of phonics pages, a couple of time pages, and a handwriting page (We just started a new handwriting book - A Reason for Handwriting: Transition - it spends the first few months reviewing handwriting and then it moves on to cursive).
I think the girls did pretty well while we did school. Of course there were a few interruptions and a few fights, but I was the only one who actually got mad! Not b/c of the fighting, but b/c they trashed the place. Well it wasn't that bad I guess, but I tell you those 2 can sure make a mess.
Well, I hope I haven't bored you all too much!
I know it has been ages since I "blogged" but things have been crazy busy the last month or so. I think I am actually going to get a bit of a break once we get back into school. We have been travelling so much lately that my head is spinning. It will be nice to be away this weekend, but I sure am looking forward to getting home and not having to go anywhere for a few weeks.
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