A Few Changes

Homeschooling has been going well as of late. I still have times where I feel like I am failing at my current job but I know that is a normal feeling. We are still doing 2 pages of Singapore Math each day, a lesson in "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons," and an art project but I have added more cards to our organizer chart. J needed more "breaks" and things he looks forward to so we added "documentary", "Starfall", and brought back "English".

I have been reading MANY different homeschooling blogs trolling for ideas. I liked one Mom's use of nature or history videos for30 minutes as a break for the kids and for herself. We play starfall anyway so adding a card for it just means we schedule it in in the morning. As for "English", it returns. I just forgot about our English notebook that we had started in September. We had used it until around December but then it got stuck on the bottom of some pile and was out of sight, out of mind. It is a picture composition book. J listens to me read or listens to a story on a Playaway from the library. While he listens he draws pictures of what he is listening too. After listening and drawing for about 20 minutes I give him a 2 minute warning that his listening time is about done. He then tells me about what he has been listening too and he comes up with a sentence or a few words to describe the picture. I write the words for him first with his help sounding it out then he copies the words.

10 Minute Stations

After reading a friend's blog about how she uses stations to give her kids some structure and her some quiet, I decided to give it a try. I made 5 different stations. Each area had toys that a child could play with on their own. I set our timer for 10 minutes. When the timer went off, the boys would switch stations. Each boy did 3 stations this morning.

It worked really well for the two older boys. The youngest could do about 5 minutes before he would start wandering.

Most of us are still in our PJ's and it is near noon because it is a snow day today. I know, we are usually home but some days you just need a PJ day. We had a big snow storm last night and 30 mph blustery winds today. D stayed home from work (he usually cross country skies to work over the lake but the University closed down today). D spent the morning in our apartment building's business office.