Our Little Home School, Week 1

I need to come up with a better name for our School. :)

We started our first "official" week of school yesterday. We actually started last Friday, because Delaney was as excited about all of the new stuff as I was, but that is kind of a weird time of the week to begin. :) The Starfall materials are great. There are tons of books and picture cards and various materials, as well as a very detailed teacher's guide to keep me on track.

We begin around 7:30am once Hailey has left for school and the girls are done eating breakfast. I am still figuring out the best schedule for us, but so far, we begin with calendar, doing a combination of the Starfall site and the wall calendar. We are mainly focusing on the days of the week and counting right now, but I will add more skills once Delaney develops more of an attention span for it.

I must be having teacher withdrawal. Setting up the room is always my favorite part.

We alternate between structured activities and choose-your-own activities, usually about 10 minutes or so each. After calendar, Delaney has been listening to songs on Starfall, or playing a game or two on the site. Once she has about 10 minutes of her own time, we move on to our daily letter.

I have been doing a daily (more like 2 or 3 times a week-ly) letter with her for about a month now, so she can begin learning sight words. It always has the same format:

She has to find and highlight her name, and the words "is", "we", "you", "I" and "love". Sometimes she loses patience with this, so we take turns being the teacher. She tells me what words to find, and has to tell me if I am right or not before I can highlight them.

 She is able to do this 100% independently now, so I will most likely change it a little bit next week and add the words "see" and "me".

The "Words I Know" wall...

We learned about the letter /b/. Delaney thought of words that begin with /b/ and practiced writing it. We also read lots of nursery rhymes, and made up our own. I really should have written those down...we are pretty funny. We played "I Spy" and riddles to figure out other /b/ words. She took an art break in the middle and drew a bunch of "juicy oranges that the worms are eating!" (See picture 2, top left. )

We made our pudding and counted, matched up bowls with lids, measured, used a timer and best of all, taste tested.

We had a tea party and counted lots and lots of spoonfuls of sugar. We played outside and on the swings, and looked for cumulus clouds in the sky.

I have a feeling that this is going to be a successful venture. :)