First Homeschool Day

“Plans are made to be broken”

I am SO glad that I reminded myself of that when I was planning or else my Type A/ OCD self would be twitching and rocking today.

We had our first “official” homeschool day yesterday. It’s not “truly” official because we won’t be registered with the school district as homeschoolers until Shammy turns 6 but we are formally educating and no longer messing around like we did last year.

I set a very low expectation to try to prevent disappointment and was happy with how things turned out. I learned a lot in just a few short hours such as:

•  Shammy hates anything arts & crafts related
•  He LOVES worksheets
•  Science Experiments are fun
•  Disguise math into games
•  but most importantly I learned to relax and have fun with it which meant that most of my planning got thrown out of the symbolic window

When I was planning lessons last month I was working on the premise that Shammy had mastered all pre-K material and we could move to Kindergarten stuff. While that is still true, he just turned 4 and doesn’t need the pressure of advanced materials; I don’t want to homeschool as a race to see how young he can graduate high school.  He is having fun with Pre-K material and doesn’t seem to mind working on things he already knows so we’ll take a slower paced approach. Who knows maybe we will end up at K level materials by the middle of the year, only time will tell.

 

So what worked and what didn’t?
Granted these opinions are based on just 2 days and I expect this process to remain fluid but as of right now…

Didn’t work:

• Remember that pretty learning nook I posted about a few weeks back? We didn’t use it and I am not surprised. I wasn’t planning on using it anyway, the kitchen table worked just fine.
• That online planner I may have mentioned? I am preferring a good ol’ spiral bound notebook (I may buy a binder at the dollar store next time I am out). I love doing everything on the computer but unless I get a laptop it just won’t be convenient or efficient since we are doing school work downstairs and the computer is in the second floor.
• Remember those cool free online curriculums? I am putting most of them on hold at least for now. We will still use ABC Mouse although I will play a bigger role in the selection of activities for that day.
• Anything remotely artsy. A lot of preschool curriculum are arts and crafts heavy even when teaching language arts and math, this is so not compatible with Shammy. He doesn’t want to draw, cut, color or glue on command so we skip that. I am not a fan of crafty projects anyway so I don’t mind.

What did work:

• Daily Notebook- I use a combination of the free materials from Confession of a Homeschooler along with 2 other sites and that was a HUGE Hit with Shammy
• Star Wars Workbooks with write and wipe covers, or any other workbook or worksheet I printed. Shammy doesn’t seem to get enough of this!
• Reading Time- my kid is a bookaholic, this doesn’t surprise me
• Weather charting
• lap boards- they are awesome, I haven’t yet unwrapped the cool big magnetic dry erase board because the small lap ones work so well