Homeschooling Beginning

I'm gearing up for the start of our kindergarten year with Isaac. Our first official school day will be the Tuesday following Labor Day weekend. I am excited and hopeful that I can't screw this up as Isaac knows his ABC's and 123's fairly well already. What more is there???

Honestly, I've put a lot of research into our lessons and choice of methods. It is amazing the variety of styles we can choose from! Hopefully I'll have time to post about our lessons as we go along. I lean way more to the unschooling approach with more traditional methods mixed in to add some needed structure. I like portions of the Charlotte Mason approach and I pulled some aspects of Waldorf school styles into our eclectic homeschool as well. Monica is letting me borrow her My Father's World curriculum so I might use that for our bible lessons or even for Jack and Sophia (thank you Jenny for that brilliant suggestion!) to do a sort of pre-k thing for them alongside Isaac.

We have two good homeschool groups in our immediate area and a few more in surrounding areas. I'm going to shadow a friend this Friday to check out the one in our city. The groups offer classes for music, art, drama, science, dance and more. There is also a reading club and an open gym I heard about just recently to give kids a chance to do the sort of games all children learn in grade school - you just can't grow up without a red ball smacking you in the face during a game of dodgeball, you know? The groups also join together to have a kindergarten graduation and other ceremonies as the kids go up in grade levels in addition to holiday parties and concerts.

Brian and I want to make sure the kids have the best of both worlds - meaning we want a more tailored education for them and the special memories that we feel every child should have, like the first day of school, or shopping for new school clothes or decorating a Valentine's Day box and delivering handmade cards. My favorite memories of school were the hands-on lessons like acting out the meal shared between the pilgrims and Indians - excuse me, the Native Americans, or searching for the pot of gold candy on St. Patty's Day. I also value the challenging projects that I'd somehow pull off like a ten page essay paper or a difficult science project. Educating at home with the support of our local homeschool groups will be a good balance of all the things we want to provide for our kids and hopefully will help us avoid the things that frustrated us about public education as we grew up.
So, we'll be starting with kindergarten and go from there.

Also, I will be writing about all the crazy things that have been bouncing around in my head a little more freely now. I've read a couple amazing books, celebrated Sophia's fourth birthday and had a great time not floating on this past weekend's float trip. Much to write about, lots of good pictures but dinner won't make itself and Brian won't make it either so I have to sign off.

Oh, and welcome all you long, lost friends from Facebook! Was high school really THAT long ago?!?!?! And, weren't we all in the Bahamas like yesterday??? You don't realize how quickly life is going by until you look up one day and see your four children and husband from New Jersey staring at you wanting dinner and clean underwear!