I am a homeschool mom to my little ones. This is a sentence that at one point, I could have never imagined saying, but how I've arrived at this season of life...well, that is a story for another time! I'll just leave it at God has gently been working on my heart in the time that I have been both a mommy and also a teacher and I am very excited for this season and feel so blessed that God has merged my desire to teach with my most favorite little people in the world! And for us, this week we started our "formal" homeschool journey. I loosely use the word "formal" because I don't want their school time to feel like traditional school that we clock in our time and leave; but rather, learning, exploring, growing, are the ways we live this amazing life we have been given. It is my greatest desire for our way of schooling to be an on-going all through out our day type of exploring of our world with the togetherness of being us- our family...the brother bears and sister bear...the teacher mommy and the inventive, crazy daddy...our tribe, our way. That in a poorly worded few sentences (excuse my pregnant brain!) is what we are setting out to do! I know that we will try things that will be great and other things that won't work. Our teaching philosophy will constantly be evolving and changing, as it should, but our core will be around a love of God, learning, exploring, and being together. And this week we set out to do just that!
Silas is four and although we basically free play all day, we have incorporated more purposeful activities sprinkled through out and a weekly book study for our school weeks. This week, we looked at Corduroy. We use Before Five In a Row as our model for our book study and most of our school toys in our playroom are from My Father's World's preschool selections.
Week One:
Our first day began with Silas being so excited to start school that he was dressed for the day before coffee and cereal were even poured! We started our school time with first day pictures. We did our morning meeting time, which consists of calendar and weather time. Next we did our devotional from our Veggie Tales Devotional for boys. After that we had a snack, since we had done a rigorous 15 minutes of school, haha. Then we read our story, Corduroy, by Don Freeman, while we ate our snack. After our story we followed up with an activity or two that went with Corduroy and then in the afternoon we worked on our activity cards with MFW's preschool toys. This was the same set up we had for our days throughout the week. I'll hopefully include more details in the weeks to come but for now I'll just include some pictures from week. Ezra's lessons this week were mostly in sharing and playing with friends because we had his baby friend with us this week :).
Can you see his excitement? :)
Working hard on painting his Corduroy.
Little brother working at his busy table but keeping an eye on his bubba.
We talked about saving and spending and counted and sorted our coins.
(On Friday, we went to the store like Lisa and bought a toy we had been wanting with our savings.)
Writing practice.
Our finished Corduroy.
Gummy bear sorting and graphing.
Week one was a fun one and we are looking forward to week two!
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