Homeschooling

We are finding our homeschooling "feet" and getting into a routine :)

A dear friend of mine and her mum tracked down some books and resources for us and shipped them off--Iz loved going to the post office to pick them up, unpacking them, deciding where to keep them, and most of all, reading them!  We have already read a few of them multiple times and one has made its way to the first thing we do every day (the Monster Alphabet book) as a review of what the letters are because she is still working on letter recognition.

Someone in the local homeshcool facebook page suggested the Read Aloud Revival page as a good book list resource so I followed her and have had the bonus benefits of getting both Iz and the Busy Little B into this month's reading challenge (they are so excited about it) as well as a post about keeping organized and planning out your school day.  We are using a spiral notebook to keep track daily of what we plan to do and what we actually do.  Iz loves to check off the box after we complete an activity and I have been having her fill in the titles of the books we read to practice handwriting.  We usually spend an hour or two (depending on how fast she breezes through her work.  Right now we are still in the review phase where she already knows a lot of this stuff but since I do not know exactly what they worked on in school, we started from the beginning and she's moving pretty quickly through the stuff right now.  I fully expect as things get  unfamiliar or harder we will have to up how much time we spend) on math and reading activities in the morning and try to do something hands-on in the afternoon.

Her favorite hands-on so far is baking :p  I have her measure out the ingredients and I usually give her a smaller measuring cup than what we need so she needs to measure out a couple times and then add her measurements together to ensure she has the right total.  This morning we watched a Bill Nye the Science Guy episode on the earth's crust so after we do our baking, we are going to make  our own volcano in the sink, just like Bill did on the show (side bonus, it will clean my drain and garbage disposal LOL).  There is a new dinosaur exhibit opening at the natural history museum next week so I think we need to add in some lessons on dinosaurs so we can do a field trip :p