I've noticed three things that make me very happy about our homeschooling. First, my son-who-is-at-home, the 5 1/2-year-old, Son2, is cheerful and doing more creative things. Second, either I or our day feels more relaxed/less hectic -- even though I have a whole bunch of volunteer and freelance projects due this week! Third, Son2 barely argues at all about what I've been calling "our sit-down work." He love more read-aloud time with mommy, and once we start working on the phonics readers he likes the challenge and being successful. Yay!

What we did on our first day, Tuesday: read a cool counting book, a read-together story, worked through a Bob Book (Mat, I think?) and the little book 2, volume 1 (Stop! Hot Pot!) of "Little Stories for Little Folks," a series from Catholic Heritage Curriculum that has more text and fewer pictures than the Bob Books.

On Wednesday, I had a big urgent project at church in the morning, so Son2 worked on logic, patterns, spatial analysis, and so on by playing games on my PDA! Later I read some books to him, and much later he read Stop! Hot Pot! and moved on to Dad's Hat. Somewhere in there he spent a lot of time with his new sketchbook, drawing a one- or two-lane road many times.

Today Son2 wanted to do sit-down work right away, so we read a fall favorite book about apples and apple picking, and another of his choice. Then he read Dad's Hat, and another Bob Book: Dot. I'm going to get out the Cuisenaire rods (unit-based math manipulatives) in a bit for him to explore, and figure out some scissors work for him to do -- he really wants to use his new scissors doing something fun. This morning we also had a discussion that was both science and safety, about power lines, electricity, and what would happen to a bird or to a person if they touched two lines at once!

I'm feeling pretty good, even though I am sad to have lost my homeschooling notes from a couple of years ago. I might order the kindergarten lesson plans and the letter and number writing practice pages from CHC.