Thursday, January 14, 2010

First week of Homeschool

Well - it is the 4th day of Official Full-Swing Homeschooling. I gotta make a blog to keep it all together - if I write it on paper the kids will notebook on it! LOL.

I'd say things went well. We started on our Sound of the Week curriculum, modeled off of www.letteroftheweek.com. I brought back some of my old stand-by teaching techniques from before the kids started Pre-K: When in doubt be loud!

Because our first sound was the short "a" sound, the kids got a kick out of screaming " AHHHHH!!!!!" each morning to say our sound of the week. We also have made some sign language progress! How did I know that with a house full of boys, starting with the sign for "eat" would be a sure winner!

Housework plodded along at a semi-decent pace, but what really went haywire this week so far was Mount Washmore, and the Princess of the Universe.

Little Sister JUST started crawling and she is at it with a vengance! All week long it's been "HEY! put that down! Wait, wait NO! Don't eat that! Don't rip the book! Mooooom! She knocked over my blocks!" She has become a holy terror!

I have decided I just HAVE to make a better system for laundry! It's not the washing and the drying that's a problem, it's where to put them while I run back and forth to the screams of "Mooom! Hee hit me!" and " Mooom, I can't do it!" "My pants is falling down!!!" (we're working on using "are" but it's a process!)

So this week I'm trying out the idea of temporary storage spots for sorted laundry. A home-away-from home for all those neatly folded things that end up in the laundry room for so long that their owners assume they are lost forever.

The other thing I learned was about geography: Some things need to be located near the learning area, others do NOT! Before school started, I spent long hours organizing school supplies into a near-by closet. Well it's not near-by ENOUGH. I learned you need to be able to grab a fresh pencil ASAP when a lead breaks, because the timer on a 5-year-old's attention span doesn't stop running when you dash away to the closet for more supplies!
I also learned 3-year-olds don't let anything just be "over there". If it is anywhere in eye-shot, it is by default more interesting than today's lesson. So even if the toy train has been in the same spot for 3 weeks, it is a SERIOUS point of interest if it is too near where we are learning.

So we've reconfigured, we're updating out space and methods, and we'll see how things go next week!

Today is our "Saturday" because we follow a weird schedule, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. It helps to be able to go to Bible Study Thursday mornings :) So the afternoon is a scheduled video-game-fest!