Instagrammin'

We have settled into a lovely tune of free range learning these days. I have started my own classes now, and have been volunteering with a few organizations. All of these things, plus the girls' busy gymnastics, sports and swimming lesson schedule keeps us on the go a lot! I have not been doing a very good job keeping up with our school blog, which makes me a little sad because we do SO MANY fun things, and I will most likely forget all about them without a written record!

I am gong to try something new in the next few weeks, which will hopefully become months, and primarily use Instagram to record our learning adventures. If you have an Instagram account, I hope you will follow us at @CreatingCuriosity and see what we do all day! If you don't have an IG account, I will have a feed here for you to view as well, which you can see is now at the top of the blog!

I know you don't want to miss these cute little faces and their escapades. <3

What's On Your Homeschool Shopping List?

This will be our fourth year of homeschooling.

I have been making a list of items that I'd like to buy, and making myself wait until the back-to-school sales are in full force, but oh man, it's been difficult.

My list looks much different from previous years. When I first began homeschooling, it included a full literacy/science/math curriculum and subscriptions to many, many online resources. I was just leaving my job as a public school teacher, and had never heard of the term "deschooling". As it turned out, I needed to deschool myself, which has happened gradually over the past few years. I have ordered less curriculum over time, listened to the interests of my girls, visited the library more often and discovered free, authentic ways to learn. I found repeatedly that the more expensive items were the least likely to be enjoyed, that the lessons on their own were fought against or quickly forgotten. If we need to label our schooling, we have become "relaxed homeschoolers" or even (gasp) "unschoolers". I plan a little, follow a lot, and the girls learn more every day than I could possibly teach intentionally.

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 I have been watching closely and keeping track of what is actually used, and what we often wish we had, and this is what we will be purchasing for now:

• lots of construction paper and cardstock
• tissue paper
• paints
• plain white paper
• notebooks
• tape - scotch and packing
• markers, crayons, colored pencils
• binoculars
• microscope
• beginner pre-made slide set and blank slides

If I can talk myself into it, we will splurge on MagnaTiles or Zoob. I really want some Snap Circuits too, but perhaps I'll wait until next year for those.

After previewing BrainPop this summer, I've decided to go ahead and buy a subscription for the year, and see how much we use it. Homeschool Buyers Co-op has a promotion for up to 25% off now through 9/1, which makes it much more affordable. We have tried Discovery Streaming (not free) and PBS Learning Media (free) in the past, but had a difficult time incorporating them into our day. BrainPop seems to be much kid-friendlier and easier to navigate. I have heard great reviews from others who use it, so hopefully it will be a good purchase!

We will continue working our way through Life of Fred for math with Delaney. We still have about 6 months of our Dreambox subscription left, which did not turn out to be a good fit for her, so I think I will have Sophie try the beginning lessons and see how she likes it. The Sassafras twins have been waiting patiently all summer to finish their Zoology adventures with us, and we are all looking forward to finding out what happens to them next. Our recent trip to Florida piqued Delaney's interest in marine life, so we will be studying that until she is finished. The Sea Life Aquarium in Phoenix happens to have a homeschoolers week the week of August 11, so perhaps we will make a little trip there as well.
 
We have memberships to local museums and nearby National parks, lots of hiking and camping and exploring nearby, and a big backyard. I am excited to see what this year holds, and how we change during the next 12 months. 

It doesn't seem like much of a shopping list, compared to previous years, but if I have retained anything from our experience so far, it is that life happens, kids grow, and interests change. What may sound like a great idea in July may be completely boring by October. If we save money, spend it on true learning experiences rather than fancy curriculum, and get out of the house to explore the world around us, the whole thing falls into place and is enjoyable for all!

Where do you do your homeschool shopping? Any deals that you can share with me? What's on your list this year?

This blog post is part of the iHomeschool Network's "Not" Back to School Blog Hop!

Our Not Quite "No Plan"-Plan

We had our first "official" week of school this week, and it went wonderfully. We school all year round, but it is time to get a little more structured and work on some specific things in between our play.

I have a love/hate relationship with structure. I have asked Cullen many times to "just write me a schedule and I SWEAR I will follow it", which usually lasts a lovely three weeks, then I decide it is cramping my style until 3 months later I have become a huge time-waster and dig it out again...

I couldn't describe myself any better.

So, we are back to a schedule. With some "ish". I start school with Sophie around 8:30-9 (ish) once chores are finished. Delaney begins working with me around 9:30 - 10 (ish). We continue until around lunchtime, unless we are just having too much fun, and see how long it takes us to "finish". (Since you are really never "finished", right?)

Sophie and I worked on writing her name and a "morning letter" this week. She loved it and was ready to go every morning.

Rainbow name - trace your name with as many different colors as you like. It looks like a rainbow when you are finished!

Sophie is learning to recognize the yellow letters. This week she worked on "we" and "is". 

Big sister did some reading while Sophie and I worked.

Then we did some math and she wrote some letters to people she loves.

I don't have an exact curriculum for the girls. I do have a few things that I am piecing together to make our own.

Reading - I am loosely using the Starfall Kindergarten curriculum for Sophie. (P.S. I just saw that they offer Pre-K now. How exciting!)  It gives me a plan to follow, but a lot of it has nothing to do with literacy, or something she is quite ready for it. I will offer all of the reading-based material to her, though, and see what she is ready to do. She has already surprised me with her willingness to learn and aptitude, so who knows how far we will end up going with her learning this year. We will read lots and lots of books, and make weekly trips to the library. Last week's book check-out total was 17. I also use several iPod apps and online games, and play them with her.

Delaney reads every moment that I will leave her alone to do so, so my job is pretty easy in that area. I am encouraging her to read a book to Sophie or me every day, so she can work on her comprehension when reading out loud, and her diction, but I don't force it. Usually, if I send Sophie over to her with a book and a sweet-voiced request, Delaney is happy to oblige. Unless, of course, she is "just way too into her book." We are reading "Because of Winn-Dixie" all together.

Math - Delaney is working on "Mastering Math Facts", which you can download for free. We do this verbally. She can write all of her numbers, but she wants to write them perfectly, which slows her down a bit for a timed test. She kind of hated me for making her do it at first, but I think she is beginning to enjoy beating her previous score every day. We also have Miquon Math, Orange Book. I am still figuring this out...it is much different from a typical math curriculum, but I like it. I can use it with both girls - Sophie at the beginning of the book, and Delaney towards the middle. We will also use lots of games and real life stuff, and see where it takes us. I am considering trying a Dreambox trial, and how she responds to that format as well.

We are studying pollution right now for Science...we learned about air pollution and this week will be water pollution, and I threw in some reduce-reuse-recycle and conservation, too. We have a neat environmental center here, and they have a discovery room that focuses on these things, which we will be checking out soon. We are also continuing to learn about the human body...next up - digestive system! Ewwwwww.

I am  using  Classics for Kids for music. The site has free podcasts about composers, along with lots of music. I saw a great suggestion online somewhere to create a Pandora station for the composer you are learning about, and listen to it throughout the day. I decided to go in chronological order, and we learned about Bach this week. The Bach station has been lovely.

The girls have been watching Carmen SanDiego for geography and I just got Liberty's Kids to supplement American history. I will listen for what they want to explore further and use the library for my resources.

So look - I have a plan! And a sort-of schedule! And it's flexible enough that I am not feeling all creepy-crawling looking at it. I think it's going to be a great year. :D

Halloween Fun!

We have been having lots of fun with some seasonal activities. I dug out my ABC leaves from the Kindergarten bin, and we scattered them all over a table. Delaney matched the "Mommies" and the "Babies".

She would find the missing "baby" and yell for help. "My baby is found! Please help it find its way home!" Then I had to cut all of the pretend branches out of its path so it could safely make it back to its Mommy letter.

There are some amazingly talented moms out there, and I was fortunate enough to find some of their free printables on Pinterest. I downloaded this Pumpkin pack, and this Halloween pack, picked out what I thought Delaney would like the most, printed and laminated. (Did I mention that I got a new toy? A laminator!! Woo Hoo!) I decided to make file folder games with most of the Halloween pack, and put some of the pages in her art bucket for her to find on her own. She found the patterning page and absolutely loved the graphics.

I like the word matching. She had to figure out which word was which based on inital and final sounds. She did very well.

(Is that not the cutest little witch and vampire and Frankenstein you have ever seen??)

Afterwards, she made up a story with the cards...the witch ran around catching everyone and putting spells on them, and trapping them in her haunted house, until the werewolf saved them all from harm.


This kid is going to be a great author some day.

She loved the shadow matching, but she could do it far too quickly, so I changed it up a little bit. I put all of the cards around the folder randomly, and she had to figure out how to move them around so all of the pictures were in the 1st and 3rd rows, and all of the (matching) shadows were in the 2nd & 4th rows. This was more challenging for her.

The pumpkin number order puzzles were fun.

I found some Halloween erasers at Safeway for .99. We used them for sorting and patterning.

We learned about measuring and comparing.

And of course made them all have an awesome Halloween dance party together. I was too busy dancing for pictures. :)

Technology is Not My Friend Today...

Although I consider myself fairly computer savvy, and can look at examples of HTML and CSS and figure out how to change it to do a little bit of what I want, such as, make a cool little blog button and a way for you to put it on your blog too, which you should definitely do, by the way, hint, hint....Whew, sorry. Run-on sentence and getting carried away...:)


ANYHOW...there is some code on this template or site somewhere that is slowing it down and you are probably seeing an error message of some sort about it, and it might even be locking your browser up. I'm so sorry, and I am going to have my computer genius software engineer husband take a look at it sometime this weekend and see if he can fix it. I am going to go make some cake now, to further influence him to do such things.

Inventory

I want to keep track of the girls' academic progress, so this is a baseline of the skills Delaney has currently mastered or is working on as of the beginning of April 2011...

She knows...

• Alphabet letters
• Can recognize all 26 letters and corresponding sounds
• Initial sound recognition and give examples of words that begin with a given sound
• Counts to 10
• Recognizes numbers through 10
• Knows all colors and shapes
• AB, ABB, ABC patterns with a variety of shapes, objects, colors
• Up to 35 piece puzzles

She is currently working on...

• Writing her name
• 1:1 correspondence
• Rhyming
• Sounding out simple words (cat, mat, etc.)

As well of zillions of other things, but these are the skills I am currently focusing on.

Beginnings

I have been blessed with the opportunity to be a stay at home mom and raise our babies, Hailey, who is currently 11, Delaney,2 3/4, & Sophie, 4 months. My oldest attends public school, but I plan to homeschool our youngest two. Before becoming a full-time mama, I taught kindergarten for one year, and special education preschool for three years. I have a bachelor's degree in Elementary Education, and a master's degree in Early Childhood Education/Early Childhood Special Education.

I am starting this blog to track the progress my children make in their education, as well as keep track of ideas that I have. And maybe to brag just a little bit, should amazing events occur. :)

I plan to keep separate categories...i.e., literacy, math, organization, etc. to make things easier to find. I am excited to begin with the basics since Delaney is just 2, and look forward to watching all the ways my girls will explore and learn to love being curious about the world around them.