Homeschool Academy, Changes in Science and New Readers

 Well, Wednesday was Sweetie Girl’s first day of Homeschool Academy and she LOVED it! She’s can’t wait to go back. I had a quiet relaxing day at home with the boys. Baby Boy is really just starting to want to play with the other kids more, but it was good for Little Man and Sweetie Girl to be away from each other. They missed each other and had a great evening. Tomorrow we have a back to school night.

We had a great week of school except Sweetie Girl has been fighting me on doing science. We’ve been using Apologia’s Exploring Creation Through Astronomy. From what we’ve done so far, it seems like a great curriculum, but she just isn’t getting into it. I’ve been trying to make it work since we started but it hasn’t been fun, so I started research for a different approach to science. I came across a blog of a mom who was having a similar problem with her son. The Homeschool Belle created a science curriculum using The Magic School Bus. We’re giving it a try and using some parts of the schedule. We did day 1 today and she really seemed to enjoy it. She definitely enjoying it more than astronomy, so we’ll keep using it for the time being.

Honestly, I thought I would struggle with having to make adjustments, but I’m really enjoying customizing things to make it more enjoyable for Sweetie Girl. It is so much more enjoyable for me when she’s having fun and enjoying herself. It’s honestly become one of my favorite parts of homeschooling!

For reading we’ve been using BOB Books and she really seems to like them, but we’re almost finished reading the Kindergarten & First Grade Sight Words and I was looking for ideas for what to use next. I asked on our local Facebook page for ideas and someone offered to give me a free set of 1^st grade readers from BJU Press. I don’t think they are the most recent ones, but Sweetie Girl seems to bee enjoying them. There are six books and they get progressively more difficult and the stories get longer as we go. She probably read the first 5 or 6 stories when we got them on Saturday and spend quite a bit longer browsing through them.

This week The Hubs and I have training for helping with Awana at our church and next week it starts. Sweetie Girl and Little Man will be participating and Little Man is SUPER excited to get to go and Sweetie Girl has been asking when it starts since it ended in May! Baby Boy will be going as well, but he’ll just be in childcare since The Hubs and I will both be helping out. This year it’s quite the family affair. We’ll see how the boys do staying up after bedtime and how Sweetie Girl does after all day at HSA.