Monday, August 10, 2009

Our Homeschool Year


I'm doing this post in conjuction with the Homeschool Lounge Open House. For your chance to win prizes, you might want to enter too:

http://www.thehomeschoollounge.com/notes/Homeschool_Open_House_2009

We haven't started school yet this year (but we just actually finished a couple of weeks ago). We're hoping to start as soon as we get all of our books in. We typically start school work at 10 and it usually lasts until around 12 or so. Luke is a very good reader so last year he was able to read most of his assignments by himself. We'll see how that goes this year.

Luke (6) will be doing 2nd grade work this year using the following curriculum: Easy Grammar, McGuffey reader, MCP Spelling, MCP Math, and handwriting. Cameron (5) will be doing Kindergarten and will be using this curriculum: Covenant Home Phonics Program, MCP Plaid Phonics, McGuffey reader, MCP Math, and handwriting. I will also be doing some of this with Miriam (3) & Levi (2). I needed to find something for Miriam & Levi to do because they wanted to be at the table with Luke & Cameron but they were always interrrupting their work. Hopefully, Micah (1) will continue to nap while the others do school work.

We will also be doing Tapestry of Grace again this year for our history curriculum. To see some of projects we did last year, click here. We will also be having fieldtrips with the same homeschool group that we had last year and we will try to coordinate some of our Tapestry projects with the Shelbys as well.

Last year we tried to do Apologia Science: Flying Creatures, but it didn't seem to hold the kids' interest. I am going to try to do "Science Saturdays" using Apologia Science: Astronomy. This just looks more interesting to me!

We typically do school work at our kitchen table. We just got a new table and benches so we'll see how this goes this year.

The table has storage below in case we decide to use this for our everyday school books.


This is the desk in our school room/guest room. I store our daily workbooks here. You can also see the boxes that have our markers, crayons, etc on top of the desk.
These are the storage cabinets and craft drawers in the school room/guest room. I use alot of the stuff in the drawers for the projects we do with Tapestry. As you can tell, I have alot of junk!
Inside the cabinet I store manipulatives and our Tapestry resource books and things that just don't fit other places!

3 comments:

Tracy said...

We loved Easy Grammar! Hope you have a great year!

Amy said...

Great tour of your school room/stuff. Can't wait for our books to come in. You'll have to let me see your new science stuff...didn't tell me you were going to use something different:) Some of my kids have been asking when we are going to start school and I told them we were waiting for books. I need to pack up all of the last year's stuff and make room for the new stuff.

BTW, I love the new table.

Anonymous said...

I love seeing your school room/stuff too! It's always tricky to keep the little ones busy during school. I wasn't able to implement it last year, but I'd love to do the bin idea: a bin with art/crafty stuff, a bin with lacing cards, a bin with blocks, etc. At least one bin for each school day and they can only play with that activity during school. Samuel and Matthew also love to do any type of sensory play: water, dried rice, dried beans and cups and spoons and funnels, etc. I thought the water play would be super messy but they have been really good at keeping it contained - mostly! And we have a rule that only one child plays at a time with those types of activities - gotta keep an eye on them to make sure they don't eat the rice or beans. I like the bin ideas because it saves on brain cells: just pull out the Monday bin(s) and go to work. I don't have a lot of extra brain cells on most Mondays! :) I always love seeing the projects you do. Fun stuff!
Nikki