A Day in Kindergarten

I thought I'd give you an example of a day in our kindergarten-level homeschool. This was a fairly typical day in some respects. We don't spend very long in school right now, due to shorter attention spans and the fact that we've already finished most of kindergarten already. I also only have one "full-time" student right now, since the other two are just 2 and 3 years old right now. I'm sure my days will get longer as I have more students to teach!

We finished breakfast and went upstairs to our "school room" around 8:15 or so this morning. Our "school room" is our former loft/library, with a couple of desks added. This room has built-in bookshelves on every wall, other than the window and the top of the stairs and the door into the only other room on the 2nd floor - my youngest's bedroom right now (used to be my office). One wall is only a half wall, open to the living room below, so those bookshelves are only 2 shelves high, but the rest are full size. We did have books packed into all these shelves (my husband and I are both avid readers), but I have moved most of them to some new bookshelves we put in our master bedroom, so now I have space for all our school books and supplies and puzzles and educational toys. I printed out alphabet sheets (1 letter per regular-size paper) in full color, and have them taped all along the top of the bookshelves. The Y and Z didn't quite fit, so I had to put those below the W and X. Oh well.

Anyway, so we went upstairs for school, and our first order of business was reading a Bible story out of Studying God's Word A, from Christian Liberty Press. Today's story was about Gideon routing the Midianites. It was a bit long for my kids' attention spans, but when I offered to stop and finish it later, my 5-year-old (Rebekah) said no, she wanted to hear the whole thing. It got exciting at the end, with the smashing of lamps and blaring of trumpets, so they enjoyed it. It helps when I try to be really dramatic in my reading. There were a couple comprehension questions at the end, which Rebekah answered with only a little prompting.

After this, I put the 2-year-old (Ryan) on the other side of the baby gate, which resulted in about 5 minutes of loud complaining, but then he gave up and went to play with his toys while the girls and I continued school. I gave Reanna a few worksheets to do - coloring, cutting, and counting today. She's working on the number 3 right now. She still interrupts frequently, but it helps enough to give me time to work with Rebekah.

Then I started lesson 11 of Saxon Math 1 with Rebekah. This is supposed to be 1st grade level, but so far it's all stuff Rebekah already knows. She enjoys it though, especially with the linking cubes and other manipulatives. Today we reviewed ordering (first, second, middle, last, etc.) using some of her My Little Pony toys, which made things even more fun! We're supposed to do some story problems, counting, subtracting, and an introduction into fractions (halves) with a bunch of apples later this week. We've also started reviewing "left" and "right" lately, which I have to be careful with, since I still have problems with this myself! It's especially hard since I'm looking at her face-to-face, which makes everything backwards for me.... (I blame my difficulties on being left-handed in a right-handed world. I'm still sad, though, that all of my kids appear to be right-handed.) We did side 1 of her math worksheet, saving the other side to do at the very end of school (the book says this time separation results in better retention).

Then we moved on to language arts (after some interruptions giving Reanna more to do). We talked about complete and incomplete sentences, and I read a bunch of examples to Rebekah for her to tell me whether they were complete or incomplete. She did this very easily, so I think she must have covered this some when she was in public school last fall. Then we listened to and watched an animated version of "Chicks and Salsa" on the pbs website (click here), and I let her play the related word-making game on the computer. Finally, I gave her a new paper mini-booklet to practice reading. There's a whole bunch of these you can find for free on various websites (see my "Links" page, and the phonics and reading sections).

Then we did some history. We normally alternate between science and history, doing one subject each day. Right now, we are transitioning from kindergarten stuff to 1st grade stuff, so we are reading through some books on Native Americans, the Pilgrims, and the first colonies before we move on to our U.S. States study. I plan to create a "Booklist" page soon, which will have names and links to all the books we're using. Today we read about 10 pages out of the DK Eyewitness Book called Native American Indian. We have just started doing the Evan-Moor History Pocket book on Native Americans too, and I had her color a cover page for a word dictionary we will be compiling over the next few weeks.

We then finished side 2 of the math worksheet, and then I had Rebekah do some Explode the Code Online. She gripes at that a lot right now, since it is getting harder for her, plus it comes at the end of a long period of sitting and doing schoolwork. She usually starts enjoying it after she gets going though. She is about halfway through book 2, and I've been realizing that a lot of co-op type schools just assign 3 books a year from Explode the Code, and some don't even start book 1 until 1st grade, so I've decided to not push Rebekah as hard right now. She's plenty ahead of things!

That finished our school day, at around 10:15am, and I went to get the kids some snacks and drinks. Sometimes we don't finish so early, and I wait until after lunch to have Rebekah do her Explode the Code. We try to get most of the work done in the morning though, since Ryan takes a nap at 1pm, and I don't want the girls upstairs waking him up then. So in the afternoons, we just have quiet play time (though the girls are usually not as quiet as I would like). I often send them outside, but it's cloudy and threatening rain today, so we'll try to do some physical exercise inside a bit later.

Oh, and we also used to say the pledges to the flags (U.S., Texas, and Christian) first thing in the morning, but I just used a powerpoint show of the flags since we don't have any real ones handy. Since we started doing Bible and Saxon math first, I don't turn on the computer until later, so we've forgotten to do the pledges. I plan to buy some small flags soon, and then we can just say the pledges without the computer images. Rebekah liked doing the pledges, since she did that in her public school last fall (at least the U.S. flag one), and it gave her some continuity.

Today was a bit different after school too, since I have resigned myself to the fact that I really need to start potty training Ryan. I had to change his diaper anyway, so I put him in some real underwear, picked up all the throw rugs, and let nature take its course. He really has shown no inclination to understanding what a potty is for, so I figured I'd let him make a few messes first, to let him see what happens. He was a bit upset at first when I didn't put his pants back on, but then decided he liked it. He made one mess without me even noticing until after the fact - it didn't seem to bother him in the slightest. I cleaned him up, put on dry underwear, and despite giving him lots to drink and putting him on the potty multiple times, he never went. For about 2 hours - nothing! It was naptime then, so I put him back in a diaper and in bed. Sigh. We'll try again later. At least I didn't have a lot of messes to clean up.

We had lunch, and I let the kids watch a video I just got that shows short animated Bible stories. They really loved it! Usually we just watch Nick Jr. or Playhouse Disney on TV during lunchtime. They love that too.

Now it's quiet time, Ryan is sleeping, and the girls are playing back in their rooms, giving me some time to blog. Soon things will get noisy again, my husband will come home, dinner preparations will start, and I won't have much peace until bedtime at 8pm. That's life around here!

1st Grade History

So after my long complaints about history and science, you may be wondering what I'm planning on doing for this coming year - 1st grade for my oldest. I have found several options I like for our long-term history plan, but for this first year, I didn't want to start any of them yet. I plan to do history together with all 3 children, but this coming year, my other 2 are still a bit young to get much out of an expensive history curriculum. I will wait until Rebekah is in 2nd grade, Reanna is starting kindergarten (5 years old for most of the year), and Ryan is starting preschool (4 years old for most of the year) before I spend too much money on anything.

So, for this coming year, I've decided to do a study of the U.S. states with Rebekah. There is tons of material on the web for studying the states - too much to ever do all of it, especially with a 6-year-old's attention span. So I've narrowed it down to some basics. I've chosen one book to use as our "spine" - Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America. This book has 1-2 pages for each state, with lots of little tidbits of information for each. The pages are a bit busy, but I think it will work well for our purposes. The book is written as a travelogue of a fictional family's adventure, visiting all 50 states in a row. The family has 3 children, so I thought it was a good fit for us!

I also got 2 coloring books: one that has a blank outline map plus details and facts for each state, and one that shows the state bird and flower for each state. I plan to do one state a week, or maybe double up on weeks where we're not doing too much else. We will read that state's pages in the Our 50 States book and do the 2 coloring pages for that state, one in each book. We may also look up some websites for that state, such as http://www.apples4theteacher.com/usa-states/alpha-list.html. Their interactive, on-screen coloring activities should be fun to do.

I also made a mini-booklet for us to complete. I found a package of state flag stickers, so I made this booklet for them. Each page (1/4 of a regular piece of paper) has the state name, a blank box for the sticker, the state capital, and the date it was admitted to the union. We'll do each page as we come to that state, and put the whole thing together at the end, making a keepsake booklet. Since a study of the states seems to be a popular thing to do, educationally-speaking, I thought others might be interested in my template too, so I've made it available here. It could be used for older or even younger students as well, as just a handy little activity that only takes a minute per state to do. You can probably find similar state flag stickers in quite a few places, but on the left is a link to the ones I bought from Amazon.

In addition to the states study, we are also going to be reading some books about native Americans and the pilgrims and the early colonies. I'll try to start up a list of books we're reading - maybe a separate page to keep all that straight.

Then, I also got a geography book from Evan-Moor - Beginning Geography for K-2. It's a workbook with lots of good, short exercises teaching about how to read maps and globes, different types of terrain, and a short study of each continent too. I already found a bunch of good videos for each continent from National Geographic (see here: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/ and here: http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/countries/), and when we get to that part, I'll post about what we're watching.

Old Earth Creationism

Just a quick entry to say that I've stumbled across a few more websites of interest for the old earth viewpoint.  This blog - http://oldearthcreationism.blogspot.com - is exactly what I was looking for! The author has grade-level lists of curriculum for science that are "old-earth" friendly! I have just barely begun to look into her blog, but I think I will find a lot of useful information there.

Also, by following a few links, I found these websites as well:
http://www.answersincreation.org/index.htm
http://www.reasons.org/

I have not looked at them in any depth, but they seem very interesting, and were recommended by several other sites. Both appear to have content about integrating science with the Bible.

A few more links:
http://geochristian.wordpress.com/ - mostly geology, but also general science from a Christian viewpoint
http://asa3online.org/homeschool/ - not much content yet, but it sounds like they may have some soon (their parent site:  http://asa3.org/)