Some Fun Resources

Make Your Own Water Color Paints
Make Your Own Playdough
Other Great Ideas


Just some fun ideas for young homeschoolers!

Reading Woes

Some Resources:
Starfall Phonics
Whole Language Reading

I found this site that does phonics games and reading practice and the girls love it. I have been struggling to keep Brianna's interest in reading. She wants instant gratification and doesn't quite understand that reading takes practice, so finding this site was a God send. Check it out if you haven't already.

I am thinking about the Bob books. Brianna is starting to try to guess the words based on the pictures. Alot of the time she gets it right, but then that isn't reading is it? I thought maybe we might take a whole language approach to the reading thing, but I just can't feel good about skipping phonics. Back to the Bob Books; I really want something that makes her feel good and gives her the sense of having gotten somewhere with the reading. I am going to see about checking it out tomorrow while we are at the library if they have them. If not I think I will just buy the first set and see how it works for us.

We have started a new tradition where every night she is going to read to her daddy. It will consist of reading her sight words, her blends, and then a short beginner book. I like getting daddy involved as he is very visual and likes to see what we have been up to.

What I want most is for her to love reading. I love reading, and I want her to experience the joy of sitting down with a good book and being so in the story that you feel like you are there.

It will come. I know. Maybe she gets her impatience from her mamma.

Defending My Choice or Not

It's pretty much a given that there are alot of people who don't agree with homeschooling. Most of these views come from a skewed idea drawn from watching a few homeschooled families who they think turned out "strange" or undereducated. Unfortunately, this minority is who gets the attention and those families that turn out the Harvard grads are overlooked. A story with a negative ending is much more dramatic than one that ends in success. For the most part, my family has at least respected my decision, even if they don't agree. There have been a few, ironically (or not) they have been school teachers, who have been very vocal about their disagreement with homeschooling. Some even go as far as to say it should be illegal or at least very regulated. I, however, have decided that I no longer need to defend my choices. From now on my answer to anyone who tries to preach the evils of homeschooling (most of which are a joke anyways) my response will be, "great! I am glad you are making the right choice for your child" or something of the like. So, to answer the last big question, "How long are you going to homeschool?", the answer is, until God or my husband(both are in agreement with the choice at the moment) tell me it is time to stop.

"Gifted"

I actually think this is used way to often. I personally think that we have dumbed down our expectations for our children and have taken away learning experiences by plopping them in front of way too much TV, computer and game system time, instead of encouraging them to get outside and play,use their imaginations, and read. Then we judge their abilities based on a standardized test or milestones, without taking into account individual abilities. I myself am guilty and am trying to cut down the amount of TV time in our house, drastically.

Anyways, on to my point. I believe that my Bri may be "gifted" in math. I had purchased a pre-k math for her(she begged to start school) and she found it way to easy, so we moved on to Kindergarten. Now we are working through that book at a rate of 3 pages per day. She can add and subtract, and we have been working on telling time. The reason I point this out is because it made me so thankful that I can school my child at home. There is no way that traditional school would have been able to put her in 1st grade math while keeping her in kindergarten everything else. It could have killed her love of math, being bored in class.

Speaking of math, I finished her math mini-office today. I will add pictures of that soon. In the mean time here is a clip art site that I found that might be useful!

Educational Clip Art

Introduction

Since this is my first post on this blog I figured I should do our intro, so here it goes!


I have 2 darling daughters ages 4 &5 (well almost). We did do a hit or miss pre-k program with the Abeka curriculum. We have figured that a packaged curriculum is not for us, so we officially started our Kindergarten year (and pre-k for Keira) using:

Horizon Math
Get Ready for the Code (Explode the Code Primers for Phonics)
Spectrum Sight Words

Some other stuff we are doing includes lapbooks, Mother's Day Out twice a week, art, library, and pretty much anything that is a fun learning experience!