Hello to all four of my loyal readers! I've decided to start a blog devoted solely to the education of my children. Whatever they're learning or what we're doing will be found here. House related stuff will continue to remain on the other blog.

Intros! I've got four BEAUTIFUL children. Our oldest, Green Bean is 4 1/2. It's her fault that I got caught up in this whole homeschooling mess to begin with. More on that later. Next in line is the Pinto Bean, she's 3 1/2. Our only boy, Fava Bean is 16 months and our sweet little angel, Lima Bean is 4 months old.

I started doing preschool as a way to get Green Bean ready for Kindergarten. She and Pinto Bean are so close in age that they would have been in the same school grade. Don and I thought it would be better to keep them separate, but that meant that Green Bean would have to start a year early. I thought if I spent a year working to get her ready it wouldn't be a problem. Well, it doesn't really matter now since they won't be attending regular school.

Sending them to public school was never an option. Our school district is a nightmare. They'd get a better education spending all day watching The Jerry Springer Show (yeah, it's that bad). After checking out the cost of private schools in the area, I began to realise that that wouldn't be an option either. For one, maybe two it would be doable, but not all four. Enter homeschooling. Boy did I spend a lot of time researching that. I can't tell you how many hours I spent in front of this darn computer. Ugh, I don't even want to think about it.

So, we officially started preschool last September. My focus was mainly on Green Bean, but it didn't take me long to figure out that Pinto Bean was keeping up with her big sister. It's been an exciting first year. We had quite a long break, some of October, most of November and all of December and January. Regardless, the girls learned a lot and are still learning. We've still got five official weeks left before we take a break. It's not going to be much of a break since they demand schoolwork all the time, but it will be a break for me. One thing we are going to work on is Language Arts. I was going to hold off until the fall, but Green Bean is ready to start reading so we'll probably spend a lot of time on that.

Right now the girls only have four "subjects." We do reading five times a week (we're in the middle of an American Girl series), the girls each have a different math program that they do every day. Green Bean is using Horizon's and Pinto Bean is using Singapore. They also work on handwriting every day. They're both working through A Reason For Handwriting, but at different places. They got through the lowercase alphabet and Pinto Bean needed more work so she's going through it again. Green Bean is working through the uppercase now. She should be ready to start the next level when we start our school year back up. Their last subject is Art. That we only do three days a week. Basically I schedule one craft project, we have a baking day and then one day I don't schedule anything but they get to do something messy. Usually paint or play-doh.

Wow. This entry is getting long.

The curriculum I've chosen to use is Sonlight. I didn't order a whole curriculum package for next year, just a little of this and a little of that. I've got a lot of the books that come in the Kindergarten package and we're not doing any formal history or science this year but, when Green Bean starts 1st grade, I'm going all out. We'll also be using curriculum from Winter Promise. I'm going to get the Animals and Their Worlds package to help finish up our next school year.

Ok. So that's about it. I think. Anyway. I know this was long but if you got through it, wow. More power to you. I should bake you cookies for spending so much time here!