What we have acheived

Eventually I hope to find a writing style for this blog, put pics on it, etc etc. Eventually I hope to provide the link for family so they can keep up on our homeschooling journey. But for now this is just me and the kids, finding our way.

After trying a few days to be eclectic and allow Trevor to have a say when we have lessons, I gave up. Trevor put off his lessons until the very end of the day, when he was exhausted. There he'd be at the table, rubbing his eyes, squirming and grumpy. There would be much shoulder shrugging and mumblings of "I dunno" in response to questions I knew he knew the answer to.

So now our rule is, we sit down in the morning and do as much as we can and then we're done for the day. I have a need to finish phonics everyday. And we're breezing through it, two lessons a day taking about 30 minutes, because this is familiar territory. He's learning letter sounds, which he knows. So the main part of the lesson is seperating them out of words and it's good practice for enunciation. He'll be starting speech therapy again in October, so this will help him, I am sure of it.

So we finished phonics, handwriting and history this morning. This afternoon he'll do math with Fibinaci Bear (I know I misspelled that). Still working on that whole math curriculum thing. Planning on buying cuisenaire rods. Soon.

A word on the handwriting. Yes. He knows how to make all his letters. But he learned some awful bad habits in school, including making his letters from the bottom to the top. His handwriting his messy. We use the K12 variation of Handwriting without Tears and it has improved his handwriting with every letter he has practiced. His writing immediately became more legible.

History is really geography right now. I don't know why they call it history. He's learning the continents, which he supposedly learned last year, but he doesn't remember. So we did them again today, with his little continent song and ended up having a long sponaneous discussion about which continent is where at lunch. Spontenaiety is the goal of homeschooling, learning happens all the time not just during "lesson time".

To meet my need in keeping track of what he is learning (I would be a horrible relaxed unschooler, but probably a great eclectic schooler), I changed my teacher planner I have. Instead of putting what we "need" to accomplish on a specific day, I put what we HAVE accomplished. It allows us to move ahead in areas, skip days for things, etc etc. It also helps me see that, when he played the JumpStart explorers game, he was learning history and geography.

So we're finding our way. :)

Why Trevor likes homeschooling.

In his words: "Mommy, I like homeschooling because I can drink all the water I want!"

His peeve last year, that he complained about on more than one occassion, was the fact he would be thirsty after recess and only be able to drink for five seconds out of the water fountain. Today, we played soccer outside and he was hot and sweaty and he plopped down on the bench next to me and exclaimed his relief at drinking however many glasses of water he wants. I also pointed out that we were free to kick the soccer ball around as long as we want and could eat lunch whenever we wanted. Yes, freedom is nice!

Not only did we play soccer, but we played a rousing one hour game of hide and go seek this evening after dinner. Seeing as how he was way too exhausted last year to actually play too much after dinner, it was really nice to celebrate the first day of school by not being completely beat. Between Tae Bo this morning, soccer before lunch and running all over the neighbourhood for hide and seek after dinner, I also got a decent workout in!