It is hard for me to believe that we’ve been homeschooling now for over two years. This is our third year! Granted, the first year was never all the way complete and we kept working on that curriculum (and we still use a lot of it!) for quite some time into our second year. That’s one thing I really like about pre-school and kindergarten. Flexibility. There’s no pressure (we aren’t accountable to the school system before age 6) and we can do what works for however many days or weeks we need without worrying about meeting any requirements. So nice!
Now we’re “official” according to our state requirements so I have to be a bit more rigid about getting all our days in, but homeschooling always has a level of flexibility as well. Some days I do just enough to be able to count it as a school day while other days we do above and beyond just because we’re feeling up to it and things are going smoothly (and the little ones are cooperating- the main kicker!). Might as well take advantage of those good days when they come along!
We’ve learned that sometimes it just works out best to wait until the boys’ afternoon nap before even attempting any school work. And sometimes we skip a day entirely and make it up on Saturday when Daddy is here to help!
We definitely have our good and bad days. Some days it seems like everything just falls perfectly into place, the little guys behave, and we have a blast doing our lessons. Then some days are just so challenging and full of tears that I never think we’ll finish for the day. (And sometimes we don’t!) But overall it is going well. There’s enough good to outweigh the bad! I’m guessing I’m not the only homeschooling mom who doesn’t have 100% perfect and rosy days all the time…
We learned that the subjects which take the longest are Science and History. I really like to be thorough and take my time so we found that the best system is to alternate which days we do Science and History. We do not do both every day! This works out because in almost every subject we almost always do more than one days worth of work. I don’t make this a requirement, but it has worked out this way so far. She will most likely finish a lot of this curriculum way before we’re technically done with the school year. This is fine with me because then we’ll have a really light load for the remainder of the required days and have the flexibility to explore other interests for a while! Plus it gives me the flexibility now to skip a subject if we need to every now and then.
Recently we took advantage of a deal I found on Moneysavingmom.com and it may be one of the best schooling investments we’ve made so far! It’s the Hooked on Phonics Kindergarten Learn to Read program. I bought it to use with Claire after having hit a brick wall in her reading progress. I borrowed this book from a friend and felt it wasn’t what we needed at this point so I was excited to stumble upon this curriculum and to get it for such a steal!
Claire and I have had so much fun with this curriculum. It is so simple and easy to use and she has taken amazing strides already! We watch a DVD lesson together on my computer, then we review all the sounds and words in her workbook that she learned in the lesson, and then she reads a simple story to me that is built on all the sounds and words she has learned so far. This has truly been a no-frustration program so far! It was exactly what we needed to get to the next level of her reading! I don’t think it could be any simpler or easy. Definitely something I’ll use again with the boys!
I’m so glad I have something official to use with Claire consistently now as she really wanted to be more involved in school time! And she’s only 4 so I’m not overly concerned about doing a lot with her, but tackling her reading hurdle is something I’d really wanted to work on.
The girls start their co-op at church just one week from today! Pretty exciting!
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