Year one recap.

We have now "officially" finished Swee'Pea's first year of homeschooling.  I say "officially" because we have completed ten months of work and have withdrawn him from the charter school he was enrolled in.  We are now in a limbo period of "hmmmm... what do we do now??"  We've decided to continue working on school work, but on a much more relaxed and easy-going pace.  In June we'll take two weeks off for vacation, and I fully intended on taking a real "summer" break once this little babe arrives in late July/early August.  

I am so happy he had the opportunity to be in the local charter school.  I have nothing but praises for it and our resource teacher!  Swee'Pea loved attending his enrichment classes on Wednesday morning, and I appreciated all the support and help I received from his resource teacher.  Through his charter school we were able to check out some of our curriculum, and also participated in a once a week gymnastics class.  Overall it was a wonderful experience for our first year of homeschooling!

I decided to pull Swee'Pea out of a formal school program for several reasons, but the main one was because he is so young to be a kindergartner.  His cousins and most of our friends with children our age have their children in TK this year, and will enroll in Kindergarten in the fall.  The charter school did not offer TK, so his resource teacher and I discussed early on that we would pull Swee'Pea out in the spring and reenroll him as a Kindergartner in the fall.  That way he would be on the same grade level as his friends and family (important to me for future schooling, church group, college entrance age, etc.) but he would not have a retention in his file.  Instead we are just a voluntary withdrawal, and we will reenroll in the fall.  Perfect!

I'm really glad we've decided to do two years of Kindergarten.  We were unable to get through all the curriculum I had picked out for Kindergarten.  My focus was on reading, math, and handwriting.  Unfortunately Social Studies, Science, and Bible did not get the attention they so deserve.  So now we have a whole extra year to work through them!  I'm also glad because with the arrival of this wee babe, we won't be doing much homeschooling this summer or in the early fall.  In the end it will all even out, and this year has been a great year of experimentation and trial and error.  It was the perfect year to test the homeschooling waters, and I'm excited for what is to come in our next year as a homeschooling family. 

We were unable to get through all our homeschooling curriculum for the year as I mentioned before, but that doesn't mean we didn't accomplish a lot!  Here is what we focused most of our attention on this year:

We worked our way through our charter school's "Math Minutes to Win Its" program.  Swee'Pea finished his last test and then got to put is name in a drawing for a prize.  He won a certificate for an In N Out hamburger.  Woohoo!

We finished all 160 lessons in our Horizons Kindergarten math workbooks.  I'm super happy I chose this program, and we happily purchased it for 1st grade math as well!  Our plan is to use this until the end of 3rd grade if it continues to go well.  

We finished the Kindergarten handwriting program our local school district uses decided to continue using it for 1st grade.  I never knew how serious schools were about handwriting style until I started researching different programs and talking to the primary team at my school.  I went with this program because I wanted Swee'Pea to be able to move easily into writing of our district if we do decide to enroll him in public school at some point.  I have no complaints or praises either way.  It is a fine program and has served us well this year.

 We completed three of the eight Explode the Code books in our phonics program.  We are actually about 2/3 of the way through the fourth book.  The plan is to conclude the fifth book by late summer/early Fallish and then finish books six through eight by the end of next Spring.  This is one of Swee'Pea's favorite parts of homeschooling and although the lessons are getting much much tougher, he really enjoys each and every one.  Something I really like about a lot of our homeschooling curriculum (like this one and the next one I'll describe) is that they are not given by grade level, but rather by ability.  So you don't have to finish a book at a certain time or in a certain year.  You work at your own pace, speed, and reading level.  I love this.  I love that there is no label.  I love that we can just learn together.  

Halfway through the year I was looking for some comprehension work for Swee'Pea and his resource teacher offered us some little readers and these comprehension workbooks.  Each book is about twenty pages long.  After you read it you answer two pages of questions about the plot and characters and draw a picture or two that describes a certain scene from the book.  Swee'Pea LOVED this.  It was such a huge hit that we flew through the first two sets of books and workbooks and are now (im)patiently waiting for fall when we can get our hands on the final four sets of stories and workbooks.  The comprehension workbooks are cheap but the sets of readers are not, so although I love this program I don't think I would have done it had we not been able to check it out from our local charter school.  It just isn't cost effective at this point with only one little homeschooler (and no room to store all this stuff while I'm waiting to hopefully homeschool this little babe in five years!).

We worked through the first two box sets of BOB books and are about 2/3 done with the third set.  We have one set left to go after this!  I think we will then start working through the "I Can Read!" books at the library, as well as check out some of the Easy Readers from the curriculum room at our charter school.

I totally stole borrowed this picture from the publisher's site because I forgot to take a picture of it.  We are now about 120 lessons through the 231 total lessons in this book.  In the beginning we were doing five lessons a week.  They have become increasingly more difficult and we are down to about three lessons a week with lots and lots of flashcard work done in between.  I would highly suggest this book to any homeschooling family, or any public schooling family who sees their child struggling with reading.  It's been a wonderful resource!

Our plan for next year is to continue with all the curriculum above at his current ability level, and increase our studies of Social Studies, Science, and Bible.  I'll also be adding in a bit of grammar and writing as well after the baby arrives and we have gotten used to our new life as a family of four.  My goal is to really enjoy this summer and fall with my (two!) babies, continue to work a few days a week on school work, and see what the next year looks like as it begins to unfold.  What a joy this year has been experiencing homeschooling with Swee'Pea!  And what a sweet way to spend the last few months with just him and me before our new little blessing arrives.