Monday, September 12

The Great School Post...

We have been officially homeschooling for twelve days! Things have been going well and I thought that I would take this opportunity to share what we have been up to.

Sugar Plum loves kindergarten! We have chosen to use Sonlight K for her to use and have so far found it to be a good fit. While I am probably more of a Small Things kindergarten educator, Father John wanted things to be a bit more academically oriented. So we compromised... Sonlight and lots of outside time, drawing and painting (and other crafts!), cooking and baking, cleaning and organizing, and anything else that catches our fancy this year. One of the things that I really like about Sonlight is that kindergarten work takes no more than half an hour to complete (though it may be a bit longer as the year continues). That is just the right amount of time in my opinion.

Little Man is three. He is just starting to be interested in arts and crafts, but his first love is imaginative play. It is not unusual for me to find him sitting on the second or third step going upstairs with a bit of yarn tied to a stick trying to catch bass (?) or building an elaborate train track system and using different voices for each of his trains. Under normal circumstances, I would leave my dreamy little boy alone and let him enjoy his preschool years playing, crafting, and reading. However, he needs speech and has been already tested, iep'd, and sent to a twice weekly speech preschool. He really seems to be improving and it is my hope that we will be able to transition out of the classes as the year progresses. If not, his teachers are lovely and I am sure that he will improve a lot and have fun in the process. I am appreciative of the fact that they strongly encourage play in their classroom.

What school situations are your little ones in?

6 comments:

Kate said...

Hello! I homeschool our oldest son(6), who is about a month into first grade. Most all of my books and lesson plans I order from here:
http://www.olvs.org/
I really admire much in the Montessori and Charlotte Mason methods, as well as those used in Classical education. It is fun to supplement different ideas, books, etc. My daughter will be five in November and we are working on basic reading and writing skills. I will start her in Kindergarden next fall. My next son(three in November) sounds very similar to yours.~He has a huge imagination and is most happy in his imaginary world, listening to stories, or doing simple arts and crafts. And my youngest is nine months tomorrow, and his favorite place is mommy's lap;) ~Never a dull moment around here, but I love it! And speaking of my littlest one, he just woke up from his nap, so I should go rescue him!

~Kate

Kate said...

We were supposed to start just after Labor Day, but 2 major floods and a tornado along with quite the stomach illness has put it off until next Monday. I started building my own curriculum, but decided to try the Answers in Genesis Preschool Curriculum. I'm glad I got it. I will have to tweak some things a little, but I do find that even though it says preschool, it is academically suitable for K5. Even my early childhood education friend believes so. I'm liking what I see of Sonlight, so I'm going to look into it for next year.

Elizabeth J. said...

My oldest is in pre-K homeschool (he'll be five in October) and we are using "Children's Garden of the Theotokos" this year with him.

I also have a 2 1/2 year old, a 1 1/2 year old, and a fourth due in January, so we have to keep things flexible! Lots of play and arts & crafts and nature walks are included in our schooling. :)

Maria said...

Matushka Emily, I am curious whether you will be using any of the curriculum that you helped develop for Letters of Grace. Has that project just fallen by the wayside?

MamaBirdEmma said...

As much as I want to finish LOG, at this time, neither Katherine, Anne Marie, or I have the time or energy to finish and so for the time being, it is on the back burner.

Maria said...

M. Emily, I wonder if you could close comments for this post? I must have subscribed to the comments last year, and I've received a whole bunch of spam comments on this particular post during the past few days. Every time I check my mail, there are a few more....

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