Hey y'all! :D How's your summer so far? Here in Ohio it took awhile, but we're finally in summer weather. It is HOT, humid and fabulous.
Bones just turned a whole 7 years old on the second. He had a pretty good birthday. Can't believe my boy is getting so big! Cupcake is doing well, my little bookworm.
I cannot believe it's already JULY!!! Where has this year gone?! With us homeschooling, I need to get my rear in gear and get to hashing out plans for our school year. We're excited! I'm going to be linking up with "Back to (Home) School" carnival over at Amber's blog. I'll be posting something about our school year plans and such every Monday in July.
Today I'm going to be posting about my school and my students.
Bones will be doing mostly 3rd grade work this year. We've done a sort of condensed 2nd over the summer so far to be sure there's nothing major he'll be missing out by skipping second grade. He's learned a ton of totally random things and taught me a TON in the last couple months. I can definitely see why normal school-teachers have trouble come autumn though. We took about 3 weeks off and Bones had already forgotten a few things. This situation led to a decision we made about our schooling practices.
Cupcake will be doing mostly PK4 work with some Kinder thrown in. This summer she has learned to read and is VERY quickly picking up sign language and French. She surprised me the other day by counting to 50. Last week when we practiced together, she still got lost in the teens.
We've decided to be rather eclectic in our approach this year. Our kids are oddball learners and have a billion little quirks in how they learn. With Bones, I have to be pretty hands-off. He needs me to teach the basics, but then he wants to figure the rest out on his own. He comes to me if he needs help or gets lost...but for the most part, he's become very independent. He has a bunch of little tricks to help him in math, and I don't even understand some, lol...but it works for him, so I don't complain. Cupcake is only 3, so she still needs me right there for a lot of things, but she too works best on her own.
We're traditionally homeschooling this year rather than going through the virtual academy like we did last year. However along with our workbooks there will be a lot of Montessori type things thrown in as well as a lot of unschooling principles.
We're also going to school year round. We thought about doing 3 weeks on/one week off, but The Hubs did the math and that doesn't get us any more time IN school than public schoolers around here get. He'd rather we do 6 on/1 off. We'll experiment a bit and see what works best for our kiddos.
I hope we're able to do more field trips this next year. The Hubs worked odd hours last year and we could never use the truck when we needed. Hopefully at some point we'll get our van fixed and not have to worry about that anymore...but for now The Hubster is back on a normal shift. yay!
I pray that this year I'll be able to figure out how to school 2 at a time. That I'll figure out how to keep a clean house and do all the things I need to do along with schooling. I pray that I'm able to relax more with it and not feel so compelled to stick to societal standards (isn't that one reason we homeschool anyway???). I pray that God provides a way for us to get both the munchkins into some sort of sport. I pray that we're able to get a keyboard or piano so we can learn that as well. I pray for patience. I pray that I find a way to successfully instill Biblical principles into their hearts and show them the way they are to go.
Now go and tell me all about your plans and link up to the carnival! :D
Anna Joy
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