We officially started homeschooling for Logan’s Kindergarten school year six weeks ago. I wrote a little about my thoughts and feelings about homeschooling here. I figured this post would be more about what we’ve been doing rather than hashing out our difficulties and all of my anxiety, haha.
Our first official school day was Monday, August 7th. We took obligatory photos, though the boys insisted on wearing their Power Ranger costumes. But that’s a benefit of homeschooling, right? They can wear whatever they want!
I’m not gonna lie, our first week was rough. I had all these visions of our perfect homeschooling day, where the kids would all come sit around the table and we would learn together and have these amazing conversations and discussions. And they wanted nothing to do with me and Logan wanted nothing to do with the new curriculum I purchased. I thought several times through the first few weeks about sending him to school. I thought very seriously about it– I even looked up the process for enrolling him in the local elementary school! (While I was crying in my closet eating chocolate by the handfuls, lol.) Luckily, we have an amazing support system and through talking it out with our friends (and some fellow homeschooling parents) we are slowly figuring things out. I talked a bit in my other post about letting go of expectations and perfectionism– this has been a huge shift for me and it’s made our school days run so much smoother.
Anyway….
We got to check out the eclipse! (Which, this is super duper “woo” of me, but I feel like the eclipse, paired with mercury retrograde, and the new moon had something to do with our rough start. I know, I know… so totally woo, but I’m not the only one who had strange feelings around the time of the eclipse… so, just sayin’!)
Lorelei likes to get involved in school work too. She loves to draw and color, which is so strange for me because the boys still hate coloring and Logan really, really struggles with writing and avoids it like the plague.
For one of our activities, we read some books about apples and watched a video about the lifecycle of an apple tree. We then had an apple tasting and graphed the results. We used our left over apples to make an apple pie. The boys loved the process of making the pie, but weren’t too keen on eating it, which I find hilarious. They usually love anything and everything with fruit and/or sugar.
We joined a new class through our homeschool group. We meet each week and explore different topics. This week we were talking about the solar eclipse and space. We read through stories together and then have different hands on activities for the boys to participate in related to the theme– then they have some playtime with their peers. It’s a such a fun group!!
The boys have really been into dressing up lately….
We have been getting Kiwi Crate from Nana and Pop Pop, so when the boys are really just not into whatever I have planned for the day… or if they need something more hands on than what I’ve planned, we will bust out a Kiwi Crate activity. They’ve loved every experiment and activity that we’ve done so far!
One of our biggest struggles has been with reading… and this is one of the areas that I’ve really, really had to work on myself– working on having patience for the process and going at his pace. It’s also one of the reasons that I’m so thankful that we are homeschooling because I feel like Logan would get so incredibly frustrated if he were in a traditional classroom setting. We are working with a multi sensory reading curriculum and supplementing with activities that I find online– I try to bring in activities that involve big movements since Logue is such a kinesthetic learner.
I got a little video of Logan reading to Chris for the first time…
The boys helped put together cleanup buckets for people affected by Hurricane Harvey. We met with members of our homeschool group and went through the book Flood by Villa Alvaro. It was a very powerful book– even though there are no words– and really helped spark some good conversation about Houston and the South Texas flooding. Check it out here:
We had another meeting with our Little Adventurers group– this week we were talking all about farm life. We shucked corn and made butter!
Can you notice a trend yet? We LOVE hands on activities around here, haha. Here’s another one… we are currently reading the first book of the Little House on the Prairie series. It’s part of our main curriculum and all of our literature, art, social studies, and even science are all revolving around it. We made bread the traditional way. It was the longest process, but so much fun! Logan really enjoyed the kneading. I need to think of a way to incorporate kneading into reading instruction, haha.
And last but not least… every morning, this little guy is the first kid wake up so we get a good 20-30 mins alone. We’ve been using this time to get our snuggle on… and to read together. He’s really developing a love for stories, both listening to and telling them. Every night before bed, he says, “Mommy, ask me a story!” and wants me to make up a story–usually involving a main character named Atticus… or Batman.
