September Schooling

So I just realized I had started a post about home schooling, but never published it.  Here you go!

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For those who didn't know, Drew and I decided to home school the kids this year.  Jenna is in Kindergarten and Grant is in Preschool.  It's something we've tossed around over the past year and decided to give it a try this year.  The first few weeks were tough, but after changing out part of the curriculum, things improved dramatically.  Now I can safely say we ALL love school.  I am truly enjoying teaching the kids and seeing them learn and be excited to learn.  They ask every day when we're having school and still haven't grasped the concept of school being Monday through Friday and will even beg for school on the weekends.  I'm glad they're enjoying it as well!

I'm just doing the same preschool curriculum that I did with Jenna two years ago.  We do one letter a week and it's mainly just "fun" activities with that letter.  Grant could definitely handle more challenging material, which I debated whether to move him up to do some of the same things as Jenna to provide that challenge, but decided against it.  I don't see any harm in letting him have a "fun" year.  He loves the activities I have for him and isn't needing the challenge quite yet.  No need to push them too much too soon.  I'm sure that time will come.

For Jenna I got a math curriculum and a reading/phonics/handwriting curriculum, so she does those everyday.  Then I also give her four sight words (the most commonly used words - some of which don't follow any phonics rules and just need to be memorized...hence the word "sight") for the week.  Each day she has some activities to help her learn those words.  We also work on writing a few times a week, where she can write stories and learn how to add detail and improve her writing.  Then each month I've planned a science and social studies topic to study.  For September we discussed apples in science and did lots of apple experiments and learned about Johnny Appleseed in Social Studies. 

So here are some pictures from August...

First day of school picture

First day of school picture

Letter A

We did some apple stamping - who doesn't enjoy playing with paint?!

Working hard

I've started doing school with the kids while Hannah is napping just because it's easier and allows me to focus on the two of them better.  Hannah requires a lot of my attention, so it's challenging at times to do school while she's awake.  However, if she is awake, I sometimes put her in the baby jumper, which she has definitely outgrown, but she loves it.

Her sight words for the week

We also did an apple taste test.  We tried six different apples and then picked our favorite and least favorite.  I believe Gala apples won and Granny Smith lost.