Hello and welcome to my blog! I am new at blogging and thanks to a fellow homeschooling mom, I was able to start this page. My 10 year old son is excited to make his own page, too. So, let's start with a little background. We are a family of five: I am from California, my husband is from Spain and we have 3 kids, ages 10, 8 and 5. I was an elementary school teacher for 4 years, then became a "stay-at-home" when my eldest boy was 8 months old. We moved to Miami in 1999 and all 3 of our kids went to preschool. It was last January, 2005, my eldest son was in third grade in a "wonderful magnet program", when we decided to leave the public school system and try learning at home. Thank goodness we did! But, this was not an overnight decision. He had been happy in first grade, but by second grade he was becoming bored. He was in the "gifted program" and made the "honor roll" but his teachers complained that he was day dreaming. We spent our day rushing around, drooping off, picking up, changing uniforms, going to after school activities and cramming in homework. Often my son would ask me a really neat question, like, "Mom, what if a king had twins, and they were both the eldest children, who would become the next king, the first born of the two?' or a question about DNA or outer space, and instead of having time to discuss the questions and the possibilities, I would say something like, 'That's a really good question, but we don't have time to talk about it right now...we need to study your spelling words'. (He says I was meaner than that). Having been a teacher myself and loving the time I got to spend with my kids (I was always volunteering in their classrooms) I thought we should at least give homeschooling a try. Immediately WE LOVED IT. My son seemed to blossom. We went on the coolest foeldtrips, alughed a lot, hugged a lot, rwad a lot. I followed the same math and grammar lessons as he had been doing in school but for all the other subjectas we basically unschooled. I was determined to get my boy to love learning again. For the rest of the school year my middle boy remained in first grade and my daughter stayed at a wonderful little preschool. But our family loved homeschooling so much that I decided to homeschool all three kids in the Fall, 2005. After homeschooling my eldest, I could not picture my little five year old sitting at a desk all day for kinndergarten!

So, what was today like? Today was a "regular" day of homeschooling, from around 9-1 my 4th grader and 2nd grader did their "school" work (from a weekly schedule I type up on Sunday nights). My kindergartener has a cold, and she wanted to wash our cat, so we did that, then she did two pages of math, then she watched a video in Spanish. That kept me busy all morning. After spaghetti with tomato sauce for lunch (my kids do not miss the noisy school cafeteria!!), we went to our PATH park group at Salvadore Park in Coral Gables. This is a play group for homeschoolers which I started this year in my neighborhood so that my kids could play with and I could talk to other homeschoolers. Tonight I am going to my bookclub, a monthly gathering of women. It is a fun night out, plus it forces me to complete a book a month that has nothing to do with early childhood education!! This month we are going to discuss, The Turkish Lover, by Esmeralda Santiago. I like the book, it is easy to read and I thought it was an interesting and entertaining memoir.

Ciao!