Homeschool. Week One.

While I someday hope to write down and process all my thoughts on why we have decided to homeschool and my research process on choosing our curriculum, this post is mostly a wrap-up to remember our first week as a homeschooling family.

We started this past Monday, our first official day at home for summer.  Swee'Pea was literally begging, begging to start his kindergarten work from the moment we started receiving our shipments of curriculum materials.  He was so excited to begin and could hardly stand it the morning we began, asking me practically every five minutes when he could go to kindergarten.

We took it easy the first week, slowly introducing our new routine and working on what will be our core subjects (phonics and reading, math, and Bible).

Just a small sample of our fun new curriculum!

We start our school day with calendar time, then move into singing our days of the week and months of the year songs.

We go over the date, yesterday and tomorrow's dates, as well as important or exciting upcoming dates.

Then onto reading and phonics!

This week we worked on the short-vowel sounds...

...and read the Bob Books "Mat" and "Sam."

After he reads he does handwriting practice with whatever our letter-of-the-day happens to be.

                                       

Then to math, where we spent the week talking about directions, colors, shapes, time, and writing numbers 1 and 2.

Followed by exercises and stretching while counting to 100!

Probably his favorite part of the day.  He does it at least 2-3 times daily, more if I'll let him!

Our last lessons of the day are from the Bible.  This week our lessons were on the Creation story.

The Jesus Storybook Bible.  Please purchase this immediately if you do not own it.  Thank you.

Working on a page from his Bible curriculum. 

Writing and coloring his weekly memory verse.

Obviously God creating the moon and sun.  Obviously.

We finish up the day with him listening to a story or two while I clean up our work stations and make sure our materials are organized for the next day.

Our first week went fantastically, and he really seemed to enjoy each task I had planned for him to accomplish.  Popeye was shocked when the first day was over.  It took us maybe 30 minutes to complete all our material!  Thursday was longer, as he had to write out his entire memory verse and that took quite a bit of time.  Next week we will be adding in a written Phonics program, which will add a good 5-10 minutes to our routine, but overall our daily schedule should not exceed an hour on even the longest of days.  In the later part of the summer or early fall we will be adding Science and Social Studies (Which he is ecstatic about).  Kindergartners study plant, animal, and human life, and he has already requested that we start with a study of bears (polar and panda bears, to be exact).  I just LOVE seeing how he is involved in his own education, and he excited he gets each day to learn something new!

He loves his little work station and takes his meals there whenever he can.

So far we are LOVE LOVE LOVING homeschooling, and I can't wait to start our next week of learning and growing together!