First Homeschool Day

Well, today we started our homeschool. It went really well, although we still have reading and Bible time to cover, which we will do this afternoon. I'm doing this very different this time. We sat at the dining room table while Eli and Mercie ran around playing. She loves workbooks, so I'm incorporating alot of them, as long as she likes to do them. We did several pages in her Abeka Letter and Numbers books (which I had from before). I had bought her a Strawberry Shortcake workbook on Time and a Scooby Doo workbook on Addition and Subtraction from the Dollar Tree for $1 a piece! We did a few pages in each of those. I also bought a primary writing tablet for $1, and for writing, she wrote her Bible verse for this week (Colossians 3:17). Then we reviewed her sight word flash cards (which I made out of index cards), and she wrote those, too. For her journal time, she gets to write at least one sentence about anything she wants. She wrote "I love princesses. Do you like princesses?" I had to spell princesses, but she did well. It took about 1 hour, and it went by really fast. We are going to have reading time each afternoon, and she's going to read her little Abeka readers aloud to me for 20 minutes. Then if she wants to pick a book from their collection of about 100+ books and try to read aloud, then we will do that. Bible time will be at night for her and Eli and Mercie together. Just reading the Bible and talking about it. We are going to the library when Mercie wakes up to get books on hummingbirds. I'm letting them pick 1 animal each week (taking turns, her and Eli) and we're going to read and learn all we can about it and do art projects, etc. She picked hummingbirds. We will probably just do this "science" as I'm calling it, whenever during the day.

I am taking this approach instead of the formal, classroom setting approach I tried with the Abeka. She didn't like that, and I didn't either. It didn't work for us. She learns by doing and writing and workbooks work well for her. Art projects, reading, and writing we do anyway, so we're just incorporating those into learning. I'm letting Eli be in on part of it, and my sister has some Thomas the Train workbooks for PreK she's going to give to Eli today, so tomorrow if he wants to, he'll have some workbooks to work in. Nothing formal or set in stone for him, he's only 3 1/2. Just learning if he wants, when he wants, until he's 5. However, he'll have Bible time and science time with us. That's a family thing, I guess you could say.

Mikaela enjoyed herself this morning, and she's watching Barbie Island Princess while waiting for Mercie to wake up so we can go to the library. She's been excited about it all day. Oops, I think I hear Mercie! Gotta go.