This week in Homeschooling...

Things hav been so busy around here, but I'm loving it. I always go through a transition period when I add another thing to the mix. So I thought maybe I'll try and wrote a post each week on what we're doing for our homeschool. Our family thrives on structure and order. Its become so obvious that going all un-schooling wouldn't be for us.

This week we decided it's time to include Owen in our school day. I have a lot of preschool workbooks from when Aidan was 3 and 4, so there are plenty of things to get him started on. I've also been collecting items to make Montessori style learning games. I'll write a separate post about those and include a link.

Here is a list of what we're working on this week:
Language Arts-Vowel pairs, rhyming and compound words, punctuation and capitol letters and ABC Order
Math- Patterns and symmetry
Science- Seasons and how the earth changes for them
Social Studies- Respect

Aidan is so far ahead in language arts, we're basically still reviewing to catch up. The biggest topic is our seasons unit, I try to tie science in with everything else. I really like these little booklets I've found online so since today we we're talking about winter, Aidan did two books, one on hibernation and one on migration. One book had a game about rhyming, the other had an activity with abc order. I love finding cool stuff online.

Yesterday, we did a lesson on respect and how our words can hurt. I drew a person on construction paper. We talked about mean things we say. Every time he said some thing man, I ripped off a piece of the person. Aidan didn't like it. So we taped her back together. I told Aidan these were the "I'm sorries". Even though we taped her back together, you could still see the tears. I told Aidan that even though we apologize, our words still leave scars, because people don't forget mean Words. Today, we watched an online animation of the story The Crayon Box That Talked. I had Aidan color a picture with only blue. Then another one with any color he wanted. I then asked which he looked better. He picked the colorful one, then we talked about how boring it would be to live in a colorless world. I found these ideas online as well. It worked out great. here is a link to some great respect activities. 

Next week we will.be starting fractions and Dolch sight words. I'm sure the sight words will be extremely easy. I'll probably start alot of fraction activities in the kitchen, then we can have some fresh cookies and learn through play at the same time.

With Owen, we started to practice cutting with scissors and learning the alphabet. He's stuck on the color blue and he can get to the letter e pretty clearly. Its a start.