School!

I am very excited to share our homeschooling journey! Partly because I am a blogger, oversharing is what I do, and for some reason you already care about me and the oversharing is just part of the charm.

What curriculum are you using?
The bulk of our curriculum is a free program I found online sometime in June. I was very concerned about the cost of curriculum, because we pinch pennies as a hobby and also I could see just from reading the "scope and sequence" and all of the homeschooling learning terms on the many many research sites, and the yada yada yada that I was already going to be dealing with two different styles of student. I knew Gracie would not be satisfied watching Zachary "do school" if she didn't have something to do, but I also did not want to pay for preschool curriculum and Kindergarten curriculum.

I needed a peace in my heart about the program, and I did not want to pay.  I could have taken out a whole lot of that last paragraph and that's what it boils down to.

The author of the curriculum we are using prefers to not have others link to her, or name the curriculum, because she wants any web searches to go directly to her site and not be confused by anyone else's site. I fully respect her terms. I will simply call it the curriculum, and you can email me if you want the actual website. I do intend to donate to the author, the work she has done is unbelievably detailed, and I believe in supporting her cause.

I am adding in:
~ Bible Writer, a fantastic Bible memory verse and copywork program.  I was able to download this for free at the product launch this summer, but it is only $4.99, and I strongly encourage you to run right over to kirstenjoyawake.com and purchase this program.

~ Character Development, because my kids' Characters Need Developing. I will not insert here how having three kids under the age of 5 was a traumatic experience in realizing that I do not have a stinking clue how to train kids' characters and we have had a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth in the area of Characters That Need Developing. Nope. Not going to go there. Anyways, we are using a simple but effective poster from we-choose-virtues.myshopify.com. I bought this poster on recommendation from a friend, had it laminated, and it hangs on the bulletin board. I want one for each kid's bedroom wall, one for the refrigerator, one for each bathroom, and I'll take one on the inside of my closet door, thanksomuch.

We are not stressing on the extras
We will have some music training, yes. I don't think someone can be a member of our particular family and not love music in some fashion. We will have art, we will have physical education, we will do all that stuff. But it is not going to be a structured thing, and I'm not going to stress myself out about it during these initial years. I have always held that piano lessons before age 7-8 are pretty much setting a kid up to hate the piano by the time they could really start to get good, so when my kids start to hate me for giving them lessons I will gladly pay a professional to motivate and excite them about the world of music.

Enough about my kids' future hatred of me as a teacher. Let's talk about how we are using the Great and Powerful Oz. (see how I did that? Literary reference to make you wanna click on through.)

Gracie-bug, Pre Kindergarten
Gracie will start right at the beginning of the curriculum. She is familiar with letters and their sounds, but there is no way she is ready to read or write yet, so we are starting at the beginning with her.

Zachary, Kindergarten
Zachary is another story. We didn't do any formal schooling with him for PreK, but from what he has picked up from educational videos such as Magic Schoolbus, LeapFrog, various worksheets and workbooks we have done with him, etc, he is going to start in the McGuffy Revised Eclectic Primer portion of the curriculum to become familiar with that method of learning to read. This puts him beginning the actual Kindergarten program around mid-October 2013. Because he is already very familiar with numbers, which doesn't formally start until midway through Kindergarten (GR2), I am going to adjust the math/counting curriculum to help him finish the GR2 math portion while he is finishing the Pre-K (GR1) reading portion, so he can begin the GR2 reading at the same time as beginning first-grade level math.

So the first few months of my lesson planner are a confusing mess to anyone who is not in my brain, but it will even out.