Day 1: The Homeschool Adventure Begins

We got started just a little after 8:30 today. (My goal is to start soon after baby Dash goes down for a nap.)

I. Reading/Writing
I'm working on shapes with Sprecher (3) this week. He can draw a fantastic circle, but he can't consistently state that it's a circle. For the other basic shapes (triangle, rectangle, and square), he can neither draw nor describe them. So I gave him four different pieces of construction paper, each with a different shape featured on it. I included the word for the shape. Although I know that means almost nothing to him, I did it more for Mario's (5) benefit because it was relevant to an activity I had planned for the end of school time. While I worked on reading with Mario, Sprecher was given those to color on and I tried to make sure to take a break long enough to state the shape and describe some features of it.

 Mario completed lesson 41 of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons today. It's worked pretty well for him and the pace of one lesson a day is just right for him now. Earlier on, we sometimes did two lessons, but we haven't for about ten or fifteen lessons now. Afterwards, we started a new activity. At Walmart recently, I picked up a Kindergarten notebook that has a half-page empty for an illustration and the bottom half of the page is lined with Kindergarten lines for writing in. Patrick and I agreed that he and Mario would keep up a little correspondence. Mario's message today was: "hidad. Iluvyu. Todartnwwerlrningtwrit." (Among other things, we need to work on spacing out words.) I was only planning on encouraging him to write one sentence -- and "hidad" would have been okay with me, but he was excited with the activity and went much longer than I expected.

II. Carpet Time
In my planning notebook, I referred to the next stage at "carpet time" and, in fact, I have carpets I kept from when we participated in Joy School. But really it became couch time because it's just my two little boys and we could all cuddle up next to each other it -- oh, how I'm beginning to love homeschooling!

For my birthday, my mom got me a school clock/calendar, so we did that. Then we read a short story from the last General Conference. Finally, we read a story from the Joy School curriculum. We're just picking up where they have it at because they plan it well according to seasons and holidays. For the start of the year the topic is the Joy of Order & Goal Striving. So we read a story about a boy who set and achieved a goal and then set and achieved an even harder goal. We're building up to them choosing a goal to work on.

III. Fine Arts: Art
I have two great biography books, one called Lives of the Artists and one called Lives of the Musicians. We read about Leonardo Da Vinci today. The books are pretty advanced for my kids and there was plenty that they didn't understand, but we talked about some new words and the kids really enjoy the caricature illustration style. We followed this up by playing with play doh.

If I managed to plan better, I would try to find a book that was full of pictures of the actual work of the artist. They are familiar with Mona Lisa, so at least there was something they could connect Da Vinci to, but more connections would have been better.

IV. Math
For math today we used the shape activity Mario got for his birthday. There is a picture of a bird, or a boat, or a castle that is made up of shapes. Then there are foam shapes to put into place to create the picture yourself. I just brought this out as they were starting to wrap up the play doh. Unfortunately, I couldn't work on it with them as much as I wanted because Dash woke up from his nap and needed to be fed, so I fed him in his high chair and tried to help, but my contributions were limited. They would have lasted longer if I'd been able to work on them with them.

V. Social Studies/Reading
For social studies, we went upstairs to our playroom where we have a big world map and I told them there are seven continents. They I put my hand on each one while we counted them. I had a great book I stumbled on at the library by National Geographic that we then looked at to see all the different kinds of maps that can be made about the earth. We flipped through that longer than I expected because Mario was pretty curious about each one. (Sprecher could have finished that much faster.)

Afterwards, Mario and I read Happy Pig Day (an Elephant & Piggie book) together. He read Gerald's parts and I read all of the pig-like characters. These books are great for beginning readers when used that way.

Next, I used What Every Kindergartener Needs to Know to read through the nursery rhymes and short poems they had there. I was actually surprised that Sprecher wasn't familiar with more of them, so I will work on bringing them into our day more just for fun. Mario did know quite a few.

VI. Active Learning
This was my favorite activity today. I had a collection of a bunch of different shaped blocks upstairs. In the basement, I had slips of paper laid out on a large plastic tote with the names of the shapes. We all started from the main floor in the living room. I then told the kids a shape and Sprecher ran upstairs to choose a block and Mario ran downstairs to find the word. Sprecher needed help for pretty much all of them (especially because blocks are trickier than just 2-dimensional figures for 2-dimensional shapes), but Mario could do them all. This wasn't because he knew the spelling of each of the words, but he did know what they started with and most of the time that's all he needed. Once they found what they were looking for, they brought it back down to the living room and matched it together on our little black table. Then I sent them off for another one. I was really pleased with this activity.

The day would have been perfect . . . if only Mario hadn't thrown up right around dinnertime. Poor buddy! There may be more R&R than school tomorrow. We'll have to wait and see how he's doing in the morning.