One Mom Show

We've been trying to get a full week of school in since the 3rd week of August but due to being out of town, a death in the family and my gallbladder surgery, we're JUST now able to be successful a month later. Ahh well, we're just sort of unofficially doing kindergarten so I guess it's not such a big deal. We tend to do most of our learning through everyday experiences anyway. ;)

My plan throughout the year is to blog about our week at least once, mostly just to share our progress and so that I have some way of keeping up with what we've done when. I'm much better at this blogging thing than I am at keeping a written journal so we'll see how it goes.

The overall goal for this year is that the kids continue to enjoy learning while also adding in a little more structure. Most of our "learning time" is spent just living life (grocery store, role play, nature walks, conversation, playdates, etc) and I typically strive for at least 15-30 min of "table time" each day. Table time consists of everything from phonics lessons to crafts. We had been focusing more on character traits (which I still feel are REALLY important) but I decided to switch and focus more on working our way through the Bible. We'll be covering one or two Bible stories each week using these resources as a guide (http://www.dltk-bible.com/genesis/lesson-otbooks.htm and http://www.dltk-bible.com/genesis/lesson-ntbooks.htm) and I'll be adding activities and my own twist as we go along. We're also dabbling some in phonics with The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, Starfall, workbooks, etc. I'm not using any official curriculum for math but I have a list of skills we're going to be working through. Each of the kiddos has a spiral that we do random journal entries in once or twice a week. I use the journals to encourage creative thinking and for handwriting practice. The kids tend to really enjoy Science, History and Geography so we'll throw lots of that in also. I'm not sure what route we'll go next year when they officially start kindergarten but I continue to pray that God makes it VERY clear to both Aaron and me.

Now if you made it through all that, here are a few pictures from our week thus far...

This little book helps keep mommy on track throughout the week.