My oldest daughter will be entering grade K here at our home. She’ll be 5 in February but has shown so much growth and interest in learning. I’ve evaluated her and found that she’s more than ready for K, so here we go!
In the ‘do it yourself’ type spirit that I am, our homeschool is eclectic and I’ve planned on making our own curriculum for the first few years. There are so many resources available for free online, and at the library, that for me it would be silly not to take advantage of this money savings. I’ve put together our curriculum focusing on suggested topics for grade K. For each subject I have a folder with her work in it – I found a free phonics workbook that I printed out and put in the folder, a bible based book for K’ers to teach them about God and Jesus, which goes in another folder, etc.
FInished work that she does and is particularly proud of has always gone into page protectors in a binder, once it comes off the fridge or the back door. That will stay the same.
My son is turning 3 and while he wants to have work to do while she is working on schoolwork, he’s not yet ready for Pre-K. I’ve got coloring and activity books he can work on if he wants to though. When we were doing Pre-K with my daughter, he always wanted to participate in some way. hehe.
This year will be very interesting. My youngest daughter will begin toddling around any time now so I’ll have two toddlers underfoot, and a new baby coming in November. Part of our schooling will again focus on birth and babies as my daughter really, really wants to be at the birth and cut the umbilical cord. She wanted to for my last birth also, but I tend to labor and birth in the wee hours of the morning and I didn’t want to wake her up. She’s already seen the videos I use in my classes, and i wrote a homebith book for her that I’ve made available for free at Motherhood Naturally Publications. So we’ll once again do that, and take this opportunity to go a bit more in depth on some things and help her learn anatamy and the birthing process a bit more so she can be ready to expect the noises, blood, visions, etc.
My youngest daughter celebrated her first birthday today. I can’t believe she’s 1!!! I also can’t believe how hard it was to find toys that #1 we didn’t already have, #2 didn’t light up/move/make a ton of noise, #3 weren’t made of plastic, #4 weren’t made in China, and #5 weren’t from a TV show. maybe I put a lot of barriers on gifts but we dont’ watch TV so my kids dont’ know the characters anyway (and I dont’ want to pay for a name), I want to support toy makers in my own country who aren’t trying to poisen my children with lead, and I refuse to buy toys that are overly done up with lights, music, noise, movement, etc. We don’t buy batteries in bulk, so batteries are at a premium around here. LOL.
We did find a couple of things, but I’ve decided that for the next year or two, and for our next baby, once toys are outgrown they go in the attic. Once a bithday comes along for the younger kids, they get toys from the attic because they’ll never know the difference and pretty soon we won’t be able to find toys to buy our kids that we don’t already have anyway. Ok, maybe that’s going a bit too far but do they really NEED new toys? No way. They’ll never know the difference, and if they did, chances are good they wouldn’t mind anyway.
‘Maters are large and green… Can’t wait for them to turn red!
