Our school day typically begins at 9:00am. We start by saying the Pledge of Allegiance and The Lord's Prayer. There are 4 core subjects that we try to do everyday: Bible, Math, Reading, and Spelling. I decided to also have one other additional subject added each day that we focus on. Mondays we do Cursive Handwriting. Tuesdays we do Science. Wednesdays are Library Time and Awana. Thursdays we do Music. And Fridays we do Science Experiments. I have found this to be a nice way of accomplishing a variety of subjects without feeling like we need to do all of them every single day. Most days we are able to accomplish the 4 core subjects and the one additional subject.
Our first subject is always Bible. We are doing My Father's World curriculum again this year and Madison reads out of her Bible Reader and completes the work in her Bible Notebook when there is a page to complete. We read some pages out of our Bible storybook, and we also work on the kids' Awana books/verses. The kids are also learning the books of the Bible and so far know the New Testament books. We are still working our way through the Old Testament. After Bible time, we each pray and then we begin the rest of our schoolwork.
After Bible we do Calendar Time. Our calendar board is mostly unchanged from last year, but we have tweaked things a little bit. We still do the daily weather, determine which day it is (yesterday, today, tomorrow), and we find the correct date on the calendar. However, this year, I alone am in charge of the bulletin board. The kids do their calendar work in their Calendar Notebooks.
The Calendar Notebook was an ingenious idea that I took from Mama Jenn. I absolutely love it! It is a binder that has all the necessary pages in it for completing each task in our Calendar Time.
The first page is their weather graph. As you can see, we have been enjoying lots of sunny days!
The next page is the monthly calendar. The kids tell me the full correct date (i.e. Thursday October 13, 2011) and then they mark it on their calendar. Ha! I just noticed in this picture that Madison needs to fix the date for tomorrow. It appears that she wrote the number 13 twice in a row.
On the next page, Madison gets practice writing out the full date in written form as well as the code date. Noah does not have this page in his notebook.
The next page tells us how many days we have been in school. For Noah, I let him just color in the boxes instead of writing the numbers.
The last page in the notebook is tally marks, and it coincides with the number of days we have been in school. This also provides good practice in counting by 5's.
After Calendar Time, we begin working on our other subjects. I have a few different math workbooks that Madison works through. "The Complete Book of Math" was the recommended book by "My Father's World". The other two books were fun gifts from my parents. All have fun, colorful illustrations and activities for learning new math concepts. Madison has really enjoyed all of them so far.
"My Father's World" has a list of other books to supplement each new concept introduced. I have been able to find these books at our local library. For example, today we read "Lizzy's Dizzy Day" and did some of the suggested math activities that were listed in the book. The kids had a lot of fun with that.
We also do time tests, flashcards, and other math worksheets to help reinforce math facts that we have already learned.
For Reading, we go through the student workbook that comes with our curriculum. However, we do this at a much slower rate than what is actually printed in the book. I have found that introducing a new reading "rule" every single day was too fast for Madison, and not effective. She was becoming frustrated with all the new rules and we weren't getting anywhere. I actually took a break from using the student notebook in reading for a few months, and we are now just getting back into it. Also, Madison is still reading her Bob Books as well as reading her Bible Reader that is shown in the first picture. We read many library books all together and she likes to look at books during rest time and attempt to sound words out in those. Little by little, she is becoming a stronger reader.
I purchased the "All About Spelling" curriculum to use for Madison this year. I figured it would also help out in the Reading area as well. We aren't too far in it yet, but I know this will be a good fit for Madison because it appears to be a very hands-on type curriculum.
As I mentioned, Mondays we work on cursive handwriting. Madison wanted to learn cursive and I figured, why not? I found some cursive handwriting worksheets online at www.superteacherworksheets.com. Madison has really enjoyed learning cursive writing and she is doing really well at it too.
Of course, she still gets regular handwriting practice in as well. One day she had to write a letter to someone (she chose her friend Abbie). Here she had to write out the weekly Proverbs verse.
Tuesdays we have a Science focus. We read the science topic out of the book "Things Outdoors" (which came with our curriculum) and I also find library books to supplement the lesson.
After we read, the kids each illustrate the lesson in their science notebooks.
Wednesdays are our busy days. We have library story hour in the morning, Madison attends a kids after-school program at our church called Kids for Christ, and then both kids attend Awana in the evening. Another homeschooling mom gave me the good idea to have the kids bring their backpacks to the library each week. That way, they can carry the books instead of me trying to juggle the stack of books/videos while carrying the baby in his car seat. Brilliant! Plus, they love bringing their backpacks.
Thursday is music day. Right now all I'm doing for this is having the kids watch a music course video series. It teaches the very basics of music in a kid-friendly way. Eventually I will start teaching the kids some of the fundamentals of reading music, and I would love to get a piano and have the kids learn to play.
Friday is Science Experiment Day. I purchased the book "How To Do Science Experiments With Children" and so far, the kids are loving it. There are 73 various experiments in the book and it has detailed teacher instructions as well as student sheets. I had both kids make a science experiment folder in which they keep all their worksheets from the experiments.
Before we conduct the experiment, the kids try to guess what the outcome will be. After the experiment, we answer some questions and then they draw a picture of what happened during the experiment on the back of their page.
We are typically done with our formal school day around 12:00 noon (with a short 5-10 minute recess/snack break done around 10:30 am). Madison is still in gymnastics this year, the kids help me with various household tasks, they have a lot of "Phy Ed" time playing outside, they do various art projects and hands-on activities like play dough, and we spend a lot of time reading books before bedtime each night - all which I count as school time.
And that is what Madison's school week looks like. Noah's school is different, tailored to his age of course. I'm going to do a separate post to show you what I do for him. He does more structured school this year than he did last year, and it is really working out well so far.
1 comment:
Your blog is awesome as always! You are doing a great job!
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