Monday, August 22, 2011

A Day in the life of....

Not Back to School Blog Hop
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.






Sunday, August 21, 2011

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.