The Cat is out of the Bag

If we weren't already aware of the vast differences between Zachary and Gracie, this project should tell all.

I gave Zachary the pieces to color, and he immediately colored a respectable orange tabby. I glued the pieces on, and he began creating dialogue with the cat and having a puppet show. How cute.

Gracie however - took a total of AN HOUR to color the pieces. And that was stretched over a three hour time period in which she also scattered Lincoln Logs all over the living room and then wailed that she was being asked to pick them up.

But when she colors, she does it up right. This cat looks like he has been through the Color Run. 

C. C is for Cat. 

Stamps for art

We have discovered a new pasttime. Great way to see different ways to make words!

Momma needs to not confuse the girl

Gracie is so easy to please. She loves coloring and worksheets.

One project this week made me realize that I think differently than a 3.5 year old girl. I thought if I cut the pieces first, and then she colors them, we will assemble the pieces and have a happy alligator.

No.

That confused her.

Zach actually ended up finishing the coloring of the pieces and glued most of it together before I knew what was happening, so I had to take it apart and show her (them lol) that we need to follow directions and wait for Momma, because we were going to make the arms and tail move. Gracie was so delighted at that!

Momma learn her lesson? CHECK.

What Zach likes to do

Zach is always my guinea pig. Firstborn, and most everything takes longer with him because I figure out my mistakes on him. He is very forgiving. :)

His first reaction to the first day was: "this is too easy." I had begun to work with him using some old Abeka readers, so some words he has already learned. So I am going to have to find little incentives to help him through this phase. Like googly eyes for his every day dinosaur drawings.

I may need to buy a bigger stockpile of googly eyes.

Also because of the Abeka readers, he was used to learning 15-20 words per book, so 6-8 words per day feels to him like baby steps. So I am working with it by showing him 4 days of words at a time, and then spending a couple of days reading the stories and the review.

Today I gave him a spelling test by giving him a dry erase crayon and letting him spell the words on the shower wall. Seriously, he loved it.

I found a pleasant surprise - Zach likes to do copywork. He was very disappointed that he didn't have worksheets like Gracie. Thanks to Sis Pastor's Wife, I have TONS of handwriting practice paper, good old-fashioned brownish gray thin paper with lines and spaced for beginner writers. So I am not going to be shy about it - I wrote out his words and he happily copied them.

He also surprised me in that he noticed the letter 'a' in different fonts, if you will. I printed it like a circle with a tail, and he noticed the san serif font on the video. So he experimented with how he would write lowercase 'a'. I didn't see that coming.

Day 1

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.