A New Beginning 2012

As I sit hear with a hot cup of tea in my hand, thankful that my hubby takes good care of me when I am sick, I cant help but feel a little bewildered. It is going to be a new year in a matter of hours and I am still hung up on the same things I was last year this time around. I feel like I completely lost my focus and vision in homeschooling this year. I lost the true reason why I chose to homeschool my children in the first place. I completely put the Lord to the side and ignored all the times when I knew He was challenging and calling me to come and sit at his feet, and bring my burdens to him. I got caught up in so many excuses as to why I could not accomplish the goals that seemed so attainable at the beginning of the school year. My problem was I took God out of the equation and was to proud to admit that I was failing and it was my fault. The New Year of 2012 is approaching fast in a couple of hours and it is my hope, and prayer that this new year I find rest and peace in the presence of the Lord. That as the psalmist wrote, "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." Psalm 91:1. That I would dwell in that secret place and find the rest that only he can offer. And allow Him to rebuild our house. I pray that all of you guys have a blessed New Year this 2012~

Lost and Found

Okay so I have been super busy since September thinking I was going to sit here and write blog post everyday was a dream that is not yet reached at the moment. I was without a computer for almost a month and lost pretty much everything I had files and all. So thankful that my family pics were backed up on an external hard drive. To add to the madness we were in the process of moving the past month. So now things are settling down a little bit and I FINALLY (thank you Lord) have a new laptop. So my first priority of course was getting back on track with schooling my son. Now that things are a LITTLE settled (when are they ever??) . I am starting to really work with my son on sight words something I have been procrastinating on and just started with him last week. So I made a simple sight word journal cover to go along with these really cool sight word journals I found on Pinterest, Judy from KinderTastic created them here is the link if you want to check them out http://kindertastic.blogspot.com/2011/07/sight-word-journal.html#comment-form

and here is where you can find the simple cover I made to go along with them if you are interested
Sight Word Journal Cover

Field Trips and Ducks

Tomorrow is our first official field trip of our school year and I am super excited my kids have no idea what is the big deal lol I am praying for a smooth day and a smooth commute. For school we are doing FIAR and we started reading The story about Ping. We have started making a lapbook so we will see how it turns out. I just wanted to share a picture with you all it made me laugh out loud. Being constantly planning I have a lot of things on my mind and sometimes things get a little mixed up lol


Well we made ducks on Wednesday and I helped my daughter with her duck before my son did his. He looked at her duck and asked if he could glue his duck hands on his duck. I stopped him and said, "Love ducks don't have hands." He turned around and told me but "Littlebits' duck has hands!" Then I looked at my daughters duck and it dawned on me he was right lol the duck did look like it had hands. We remedied that with his duck having "feet". 

 I hope I am not alone when things don't turn out the way they were planned in school. All I could do was laugh!! Have you ever had a crazy days in school when things did not turn out as you had envisioned? In my case it turned into a teachable moment as we talked about how funny ducks would look if they had hands!

Calendar Notebook

After we eat breakfast and do our time of devotion and worship we start our calendar notebook. This may sound pretty simple but during this time we cover a lot of basic math concepts that we build on each day. Last year I had a calendar board that we used an example of this and how to make one can be found at  can be found at 1+1+1=1 Raising Rock Stars. Using this board was ideal for us last year because Little Bits was not as mobile but now that she is in everything we started doing the calendar notebook instead. After 9 days of school it seems to be working out pretty well. Here are some of the activities we cover:

This is the big calendar we use to go with the calendar notebook. We map the days of the week and the pattern of the month.

This is one of the songs we cover in the morning we use it to learn syllables.

Every month we have a different song that
 relates to the month we are currently on and how to spell it.

This is the calendar we use every day we trace the day we are on and count the days we have covered in the month so far.

This is the pattern section of the calendar where my son makes the pattern that correlates with the one on the big calendar.

These two pictures are where we record the days of the school year 

 This is my son working on his weather graph. Each month we start a new graph and track how the weather changes from season to season                     

There are a couple of things that I have in the notebook that are not shown. We have a coin table that we use to practice counting money and a clock that is laminated to help learn how to tell time. I printables shown in the picture are found at various locations for free on the internet. These are the websites that I use: Mama Jenn and Growing Kinders and. There are a lot of other resources out there feel free to share your thoughts. And follow me on Pinterest as a find free resources and ideas to help in our class @ home.

A Day in the life of....

Well today was the first day of school for us and trying out the new schedule for the year. We are starting our second year of homeschooling and Kindergarten for my son and my daughter she likes to be the assistant teacher. Her main job is to destroy decorate the class with her special gift of tearing papers and any other forms that are deemed unworthy for the class lol

Meet the students: 

 Lightning and Littlebits

The schedule for Today:

8:00: Read a Psalm and shower for mom/teacher- This went smoothly today I thought I was behind in my schedule but in fact I was ahead a half hour

8:30: Breakfast- and wash some dishes, chore time my son is starting a chore chart this year courtesy of Homeschool Creations and her fantastic chore chart for preschoolers!!

9:00-10:00 : Group Time, this includes

•  Calender time and Calender Notebooks (idea borrowed from fellow blogger MamaJenn) covering days of the week, months of the year, patterns, talk about money and graph the weather

• Bible: This includes a time of prayer, doing a Bible study together and review

Around this time things  got a little out of control. Since the Calender notebooks are new to us this year it took a long time for us  to get through all the activities that we needed to get done by the time it was time for Bible time my son was ready for a break and it showed during his journal time. He was completely tired and needed a break and my daughter needed a nap. So tomorrow I think we are going to do our Bible time during breakfast time and do our Calender time  as scheduled and take a walk and have some excercise time outside before we continue.
So calender and Bible time ran until 12:30
12:30: We read the Kissing Hand and talked about Chester the Raccoon.  We made a book about Chester going to school and we made puppets.

1:00: Lunchtime- Grilled cheese and grapes
1:30: Silent reading Time and Mommy reads to her babies
2:00: Freeplay time and Littlebits lunchtime
2:30: Outside play time and end of school

Today the day was a little crazy and we had a lot of going over new journals and listening skills. I am still waiting on my core curriculum to come in the mail. As we started this new year I noticed some areas I need to review with my son which include: the structure of a sentence, the sounds of different letters and writing the letters. Tomorrow we start our co-op at ICAP so our schedule will be a little different tomorrow. If you have any suggestions please leave me a comment and let me know.

Things that I am preparing for Kindergarten

So far I am working on a schedule for our day seeing as our school is at home it is a work in progress. I will post next week about our schedule and how it is going in more detail. So far I have made a Math journal for my son to use each day. In this journal he will be working with problem solving math problems. This allows him to make pictures and write out the process he used to solve his problem. I gathered this idea from a fellow kindergarten blogger at http://www.kindergartenkindergarten.com the teacher at this site has some awesome ideas that I am borrowing for this year.

     My son's Writing Journal

 

I also made my son a science journal and a writing journal that will be used during our writing workshops.The cute label for this science journal can be found at the blog referenced earlier. I also prepared a calender notebook for the year that will be used to cover a wide range of topics from the months of the year to skip counting and number recognition. If you have any questions regarding the Calender Notebook feel free to leave a comment.

Science Journal

Preparing for the Kindergarten Class- 2nd year homeschooler

Well school starts tomorrow and I am writing this blog to try to keep things organize and help me stay focused (I suffer from add and many times I follow a link and go down many rabbit holes) anyways, so let's get started. Seeing this is my second year homeschooling I do not know everything like a lot of seasoned pros out there in the blogosphere. I follow a lot of other blogs and draw ideas that fit my teaching style, motto and my child's learning style. As of now I am doing a lot of prep work considering my core curriculum was suppose to be here last week but did not show. Praying that it comes the first week of school. As you will notice I gather resources from a lot of different areas many from other homeschool mom bloggers who have amazing ideas and other times from teachers that teach kindergarten in the school system. Mixing both allows me a range of things that I can work with and use in my class that consist of my 4 soon to be 5 year old son and my 16 month old daughter and our class/pet hamster Buster lol So join me on our crazy adventure through the world of discovery, learning and growth.