Homeschool Update

Here is my conclusion: The hardest part is starting.

I had in my mind a vision of what I wanted to do with Amy to begin our homeschooling (even though she is not technically school-age), but giving up my time to begin doing it was sooooo hard.  It took me four months of seriously thinking about it (and more than a year of less seriously thinking about it) to actually schedule and DO our homeschooling.

Now we've been doing it seriously for two weeks and Amy and I are both loving it. The ideas for curriculum and activities come to me easily thanks to my kindergarten teaching experience.  Putting aside MY time and making it OUR time was hard, but it only took a few days to realize how fun and meaningful it is.  It's worth it and I'm glad we FINALLY got started!

I'll plan to post about our homeschooling activities and ups and downs on a regular basis.

Right now we're going through each of the letters.  Amy knows the name and sound of most of them, but we're still reviewing them one-by-one.  She doesn't know the lowercase letters quite as well.  Writing them is hard, but I don't stress it too much since she is only three.  This past two weeks we've learned about Max the Mouse who loves to munch, BoBo the bear's birthday, Silly Squinkies, and Andy who has Allergies.  (While I was teaching I assisted BYU with a research project called SEEL and helped develop hundreds of playful, fun, phonics lessons.  If you're interested you can view them here: http://education.byu.edu/seel.  It's free and printable!)

We've also worked on numeral recognition and AB patterns.  We've made pattern trains and Valentine wreaths with hearts in an AB pattern to give to our elderly neighbors.

Today when I didn't have much energy or anything planned we just did our alphabet train puzzle and played Candy Land.  But at least we didn't just not do it!