Last week, we began a new approach to homeschooling.  Last fall, I purchased a preschool curriculum and now wish I hadn’t.  It isn’t engaging, interesting or worth the money I spent on it, in my opinion.  I wish I’d discovered Confessions of a Homeschooler last summer…

If you have any interest in homeschooling or even just want some fun activities to do with your kids, you absolutely must visit her blog.  She has activities for all ages, but she seems to focus a lot on preschool, which is definitely to my advantage.  She has an entire set of downloads for each letter….letter/pre-reading activites, counting activities, color and shape recognition….you name it, it’s all there!  She’s offering the entire set for $10, but you can also go to her Letter of the Week category, search for the letter you want to focus on and download all of it for free (that’s what I’m doing).

Last week we also began using the workbox system, which I love.  It takes a little more organization and preparation on my part, but it’s very effective.  Both of the kids have a set of workboxes.  For school-age kids, you’re supposed to have 12 boxes for each day, but we’re just doing 4 for each of the kids right now because they’re just toddlers.

For Kelvin, I just put toys or puzzles in his boxes.

He also loves doing magnetic pages like Ava does.  You can buy magnets to go with these printables, but I just bought some magnets from Walmart and used a hot glue gun to attach poms to them.  The kids love them!

Obviously, he’s not old enough for things like counting and letter recognition, but this gets him involved which thrills him and prepares him for preschool.

Before you get the idea that he always sits there and concentrates on his projects, let me assure you that sometimes he runs wild and stands on the table while I’m trying to help Ava with an activity. *sigh*  This kid is going to give me a heart attack one of these days…I’d better start looking at life insurance quotes!

Ava started working on the Letter A last week.  We had some activities that we did every day, such as her memory verse and story from My ABC Bible Verses: Hiding God’s Word in Little Hearts and tracing her letter A’s.  I laminated this so that she could practice and wipe it off as many times as she needed or wanted to.

Then we had other activities we only did a few times.  Some of them are pictured here, but I wasn’t able to snap shots of every activity, thanks to a busy little guy who kept me on my toes!

We made letter A alligators out of green foam.  I cut out the letter A and she cut and glued the teeth and the googly eye on it.

We did a puzzle with Aa’s and an apple tree on it.

This is one of the magnetic printables I showed Kelvin doing….for the Letter A (she also did one for the Number 1 that isn’t pictured).  You’re going to have to excuse the horrible lighting.

She did an amazing job on her A Lacing Card!  She’d never done a lacing card before, so I was surprised at how well she did.

We worked on sorting apples by size.

She matched number cards to the trees with the same number of apples on them.

She matched capital and lowercase A’s on colored ants:

To end the week, we made slab apple pies.  Basically, you press the crust into a 13×9 inch pan instead of a pie plate.  This makes it much easier for little people to help!

As you can see, we have a lot of fun with preschool at our house.  They don’t see it as work (Ava always says, “Let’s play school!” at school-time) and we don’t do workboxes all day.  It’s really nice to have some structured activities in addition to free play, though.

To see other Letter A activities we did and download all the activities, I strongly encourage you to visit Confessions of A Homeschooler’s Letter A post.

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Lately, I’m seriously questioning my ability to home school Ava when she gets to be about kindergarten age.  I can’t even teach this child her numbers and colors!

Let me clarify…I can teach them to her, and she learns them, but she refuses to demonstrate that she’s learned them.  No matter what mood she’s in, she always pretends she doesn’t know how to count or identify colors.

I know she knows them…especially her numbers because when we’re playing hide and seek, I’ll start counting with her and she’ll count several numbers on her own.  But tonight, Chad just tried to get her to count to three and it took him 30 minutes!  It went something like this:

Daddy: 1…2…what comes next?
Ava: 1,2,1,2!
Daddy: No, 3!  Say 3.
Ava: 3
Daddy: OK, 1…2…what comes next?
Ava: 1!

And on and on it went.

Any tips?  Advice?  I know she’s only 2, but it’s really frustrating that I’ve taught this stuff to her and she won’t even prove that she knows it.  Know what I mean?  At this rate, she’ll never be doing a New York Job Search!  LOL

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Last week was Ava’s first week of toddler school!  I use the term toddler school, because she’s not technically a preschooler yet and we’re being pretty laid-back about it at this point.  She’s only 2, and the curriculum is meant for her age group, but our main goal is to get her used to doing school and hopefully teach her a few things along the way!

I’m using this curriculum and I like it so far.  They don’t have a rigid plan of what they want you to accomplish each day.  Instead they have objectives for what the child should be able to do at the end of each month.  They also have some seat work and some out-and-about projects (identifying parts of the community, learning about transportation, etc.) so that you can choose what suits the child’s mood that day.

I bought the pdf download of the curriculum, which was considerably cheaper than buying the wipe-off book.  This week, I’ve just been printing out each worksheet for Ava and letting her write straight on the page, but I think we’re going to change that this week.  I didn’t realize how many times she was going to need to do each worksheet!  Instead, I’m going to put the worksheets in page protectors and let her use a dry-erase marker.  That way she can trace whatever she’s working on that day over and over again without me having to print out new sheets!

While we are having some issues with attention span and cooperation, I do understand that she’s only 2 and it’s to be expected.  I definitely do not want to make school something she doesn’t enjoy (especially at this age), so we’re being very flexible and following her lead.  I’m hopeful that as we keep going, she’ll get used to it and we’ll have lots of fun this year!

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I have a confession to make.  Teaching the little ones the fundamentals is not my most favorite part of homeschooling.  I used to feel VERY guilty about this…because, afterall…if I don’t enjoy laying these fundamental building blocks in my children’s education what kind of message am I sending to them?  What kind of learning experience am I providing them with?

I think it’s very important to not only teach these fundamentals to children…but I also think it’s even more important for them to discover that learning is FUN and ENJOYABLE!

We finally managed to figure this out in my house with the discovery of one very simple, yet very important program. It’s not fancy and it is not expensive. In fact, it is one basic soft-cover book…yet when I purchased Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons when Ruthie was learning how to read a couple of years ago, our reading lessons MAGICALLY went from tears and frustration to fun and MORE FUN!

The lessons are only about 20 minutes long and you even get a SCRIPT to read, moms! Yeah! It doesn’t get much easier than that! Ruthie immediately responded positively to the lessons and began making measurable progress right away. We switched to this curriculum somewhere around November-December of her 1st grade year and we stuck with it in place of the regular Reading/Language Arts lessons that are part of our 1st grade curriculum. We continued with her other first grade subjects as usual.

Anyway, Ruthie was then newly six (September birthday) so I would consider a little on the young side for first grade…but we kept at it and she was able to go on to 2nd grade the next fall and she fell right into step with our regular 2nd grade curriculum at that point.

The bottom line…Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons is just what any parent who struggles with some of this fundamental teaching needs. It’s created for children ages 4-6 and we’ve tested this as well because four-year-old Abby is using it now with similar success.

Check this out…I’d love to hear other suggestions for what you loved for this age, too, if you have them!

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I’ve been in “organize life” mode lately as we are embarking on a brand new homeschool year this week. This time of year always motivates me to get all my duckies especially organized and in a row and I find myself running around a little nuttily as I am driven to accomplish this.

As I write this, we have our first day under our belts…we had a decent supper, laundry is caught up, floors are vacuumed and swept, and house is pretty picked up.

I still have to organize the lessons for tomorrow morning and get kids ready for bed…but I am feeling pretty good about our first day.

What would I have to say if our day had not gone quite so well, though? Good question! I think I would say:

1. Focus on what went well
2. Analyze what went wrong
3. Cut myself some slack
4. Realize it’s a marathon and one day isn’t that important
5. Do what I can to insure tomorrow’s success
6. Do something that rejuvinates me
7. Get a good night’s sleep

I have had my share of “days like that.” I know how demoralizing they can be. The best thing you can do is just pick yourself up and start over the next day on the best foot that you possibly can!

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