Filing System & First Day of School

I spent some time researching the best way to track my lesson plans. I started by entering everything into My Mardel Homeschool.  This is an amazing website that allows you to do so many things. The best part is, it’s all free! You can enter and track grades, enter weekly lesson plans with multiple options, enter assignments, curriculum and so much more. The one thing so far that I don’t like is how the lessons plans look when printed. Once I realized it wasn’t going to work, I started looking for other options. I found 3 that I like and plan to alternate them until I decide which I like best. I shared the links for them in my previous post.

I found this filing idea while searching on Pinterest and have been working on tweaking it to fit my needs. I bought a plastic crate, green hanging folders and manila folders. This is what I am doing since I just have 1 child that will be homeschooling on a regular basis.

I’m planning to have 2 manila folders for each subject. One will hold anything that fits from that subject. The other one will be used to hold the assignments for the week. I have hanging folders for each month and then each week.

Once everything is entered into My Mardel Homeschool, I can put all assignments back into that month’s folder and then move the folder to the back of the crate. That way, everything for this year will be organized in one place.

The other thing I really like about this system is I can use it for other things besides stuff for homeschooling. For example: Baby Boy just had his two year checkup. They like to see them when they are 2 ½ and Little Man will be due for his 4 year check up at the same time. I was given the paperwork that needs to be filled out and returned for these check ups. This paperwork was put in the January hanging folder, so when January comes around, I have the paperwork and know that I need to fill it out. It’ll also be a reminder to schedule their appointments if I haven’t done so by then.

Another great thing about this system is that if something doesn’t get finished, it can stay in the folder and be moved to the next week to be completed.

We started school today and I’m anticipating needing to make some changes. The most important thing to me right now is that Sweetie Girl continues to enjoy school. So if it seems like too much we’ll scale back or make needed adjustments.

Above is our unfinished room turned homeschool room!

I told Sweetie Girl right before she went to sleep that I wanted her to make her bed, get dressed eat and brush teeth in the morning. When I got up at 6:45 this morning, she had done everything except eat. I know, I know, she brushed her teeth before eating. My plan was to start school at 8am, but she was begging to start school by about 7:15. We made it to about 7:45 and then started. I had planned for a break/snack time at about 9:30, but she didn’t want to stop.

So, we kept going while she ate her snack and we finished with all our book school by 10:30. Then she helped me clean the living and dining room windows. She’s loving the school room! As I’m typing this, she’s in there coloring! When we finished, I asked her what her favorite part of school was and she said coloring. She had a couple of coloring pages to do while I read. She said her least favorite part was spelling. She had to write her 8 spelling words 3 times each. She doesn’t seem to like writing much. Here is my schedule of subjects each day:

Daily Subject Schedule

Monday & Thursday

Bible

History

Math

Geography

Spelling

Reading & Phonics

Language Arts

Tuesday

Bible

Science

Math

Spelling

Reading & Phonics

Language Arts

Friday

Complete Unfinished Work

Science

Library/Field Trip

Spelling

I made a schedule to go with our homeschooling to clean a part of the house each day of the week and a load of laundry; washed, dried, folded and put away. I’m trying to avoid having to do all the laundry on one day. When there are 5 people in your family, the laundry can get pretty overwhelming! Here’s what my schedule looks like:

 Cleaning Schedule

Monday- Wash Kids Clothes, Sweep, Clean Living Room

Tuesday- Wash Colors, Clean Kitchen, Sweep

Wednesday- Wash Whites, Clean Playroom, Sweep & Mop

Thursday- Wash Bedding, Clean Kids Rooms, Sweep

Friday- Wash Kids Clothes, Clean Master Bedroom, Sweep

Saturday- Wash Colors, Clean Bathrooms, Sweep

Sunday- Wash Whites, Clean Homeschool Room, Sweep

Little Man even joined us to do a little school as well! Baby Boy played with his trains, he is obsessed with them! Sweetie Girl and Little Man played with play dough as well.

We also got serious about potty training Little Man this weekend. He’s been pretty stubborn and I just haven’t had the desire to force it. He went in the potty several times yesterday and today. We did have a #2 accident this morning, but besides that, he’s been dry and went in the potty a couple of times.

Now, it’s 11:30 and we are finished with school and my room of the day is clean. I still need to fold and put away some clothes and make dinner, but I’d say this day has been a success!

Homeschooling- What We Chose

Note: These are all my own opinions, I purchased all of these items with my own money. No one is paying me to write this.  

We’ve been homeschooling since January. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time doing research. I like to know what my options are and then figuring out what would work best for our family. I’m going to spend this entry sharing what I thought we’d use, what we ended up using and why.

In the beginning, I wanted something that told me exactly what to do on what day. I wanted someone else to do all the work for me. So, we were looking at Sonlight. This program looks amazing and I would still really like to give it a try one day, however the price just isn’t in our budget at this point.

Next, I heard about Timberdoodle and fully intended to use this. I am using some aspects of it. We were planning to do the Basic 1^st Grade package and then add a couple of things from the complete package. I found the 2 things I wanted from the complete package used and on sale locally and was waiting a little bit to buy the rest. I’d still really like to give this a try as well. I’m thinking we may get some of the educational games as Christmas gift! They look like a ton of fun!

While waiting, I decided to give lesson planning a try. This would save us money if it worked and if I did it all or at least the first semester at the beginning of the year, I wouldn’t be spending so much of my time figuring out what to do. I got lesson planning sheets from these blogs: http://miloandoats.com/free-homeschool-lesson-planner/

http://www.thehandmadehome.net/2014/06/free-planner-and-calendar-more-2015/

http://www.playdoughtoplato.com/awesome-free-lesson-plan-book/ - This one you have to subscribe to their blog to get the lesson planner. I’m using a different one each week to see what one I like best.

I spent a few weeks in July trying to decide what I wanted to do for each subject. These are the subjects we will be working on this year:

Bible: We’ll work on memorizing scriptures for Awana.  I also just bought the first book in Apologia's What We Believe Series- Who is God? And Can I Really Know Him. I bought this at one of our local used bookstores. I’m planning to get the Coloring Book for the kids to use along with it. There is a Junior Notebooking Journal and a Notebooking Journal available for this as well.  The Hubs also reads the Bible to the kids in the evenings.

History: We will be reading Story of the World Volume 1: Ancient Times. I’m thinking this will take more than a year to read since there are 42 or so chapters and we’ll be reading one chapter each week. I found a lesson plan that I will loosely be using here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/kay-barre/sotw-i-workbook-pages-two-day-a-week-format/ebook/product-3018696.html

Math: We’re thinking eventually we’ll give Life of Fred a try, but right now we have Addition and Subtraction workbooks that I purchased from Dollar Tree and several other worksheets that I printed for last year that we haven’t used yet.

Geography: We purchased Road Trip USA from Confessions of a Homeschooler. We worked on a couple of lessons previously but we’ll start over from the beginning and use the first 2 or 3 weeks as review.

Spelling: k12reader.com has 36 weeks of spelling words and much more for free. We will be doing the 1^st Grade spelling words. They have 5 days of worksheets and then you take a test at the end of the week. This is all free and I’m hoping it works for Sweetie Girl!

Reading & Phonics:  I have a few workbooks from Dollar Tree, that we’ll be using. I was also able to buy the Kindergarten & First Grade set of BOB Books used and we’ll be reading through those as well as a list of good 1^st Grade readers that I found through Pinterest. We’ll get these books from the library. I have several other books lists that we’ll check out as we need them. We have also been reading through the Little House on the Prairie series. I typically read 1 chapter before bed each night. This has become a routine for Sweetie Girl. She isn’t interested in reading it at any other time of the day and she’s disappointed if we don’t have time to do it. It also calms her down and I think it helps her get to sleep more quickly. She really seems to like that it’s time for just her and I and she gets to stay up a little later than her brothers!

Language Arts: I’m still doing some work with this, but we’re starting out by using what is in the Language and Literacy section of What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know and What your First Grader Needs to Know. These have information on what to teach them for several subjects and you could probably just use these when first starting out. We have older versions of both. They were gifts from one of The Hubs’ co-workers.

Science: We’ll be using Apologia’s Exploring Creation with Astronomy. We are using the Junior Astronomy Notebooking Journal to go with it. There is a Notebooking Journal for older kids as well.  There was a great schedule in the Junior Notebooking Journal, so it made lesson plans really easy!

History, Geography and Science will all be taught 2 days each week, all other subjects will be taught daily. We decided to skip Handwriting this go round, because most of the other subjects involve a great deal of writing and I’ll be able to work with her during those times.

Next post I’ll share my filing system and hopefully I’ll be better at posting on a regular basis. I’d really like to share our experience and how everything ends up working for us.

I also have a few pre-k workbooks for Little Man if he seems interested in school. Right now, he’s more interested in playing with Baby Boy and their trains!

Homeschool Update #2

Well, today we begin week 3 of Homeschooling. I think overall it’s been pretty successful. I’ve had to readjust and find what works best for Sweetie Girl. We’re still working through all the details and getting into a routine.

I’m anxious to finish 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum and get some good curricula for her. It’s exhausting trying to figure it all out on my own. I’m excited to have something that tells me what to do and when to do it. 

We had a few new things happen this week. We pretty much skipped a whole day of school, because Sweetie Girl just wasn’t feeling it. There have been days when we struggled through getting school work finished and I’ve tweaked the work, to avoid huge struggles. I guess that’s the benefit of essentially creating the curriculum myself. However, today when we planned to do school, a last minute nap was needed for a certain Sweetie Girl. We did bake bread go to the library and she helped me with dinner several times this week.

We also went on our first field trip this week! We went to the zoo for the first time this year! Sweetie Girl helped me create a Zoo Passport for her,  Little Man and our friends to see what animals we saw at the zoo! She was SO excited to show everyone and we had a great time picking out pictures of all the animals! Unfortunately her’s disappeared before we left the zoo. 

This week, we will begin a CO-OP. We are excited about it! Friday School will give Sweetie Girl a chance to be with kids her age and older as well as some extra learning opportunities for the boys! I can’t wait to get involved and connected with some local homeschool families. 

On a total different subject, we finally got Sweetie Girl into a twin bed this weekend! She’s really excited! This created a chain reaction we’ve needed to do for quite sometime. Little Man got moved to the toddler bed and Baby Boy finally moved out of the pack n play and into the crib. 

Here are a few pictures from our first week of homeschooling, zoo and new beds for all! 

We moved from Texas to Colorado in 2013, just 2 short months after Baby Boy was born. Sweetie Girl was 4 and we had been discussing what we wanted to do for schooling. We had been looking into preschools before we moved and decided to just do some preschool stuff at home instead of sending her somewhere. Especially since school would have already begun once we made our move. We tried to do some research on schools in Colorado once she turned 5, but had trouble really locating any options. We knew we didn’t want to send her to public school and we didn’t want to send her to a huge school. There were very few charter schools where we had moved from and we didn’t even think of researching them. So, we landed on private school. We got a scholarship that made it somewhat affordable.

We started thinking about the future, we could only get the scholarship for 3 years and we still have 2 more kids at home. I know for a lot of you, changing schools doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but I lived in the same house from the time I can remember and went to the same school district with most of the same people from kindergarten thru graduation. It’s hard for me to imagine what it would be like. I also think it would have been devastating to me if I had moved. We’re thinking eventually, there’s going to come a time when private school just isn’t an option and really it was barely an option in the first place. We decided to start looking into what other choices may be available.

There were also many other reasons we began to look at our other options. The biggest reason was that Sweetie Girl would frequently make comments about never getting to see us or spend time with us or snuggle with us. She was utterly exhausted everyday. She would fall asleep on the couch every night before bed until we moved up her bedtime and then she still ended up crashing on the couch several nights a week. There was a significant increase on whining and fit throwing as well. Also, I had to move up the boys nap times so they could get it in before we had to leave to get Sweetie Girl from school and I ended up waking them from naps pretty much daily. 

We started this whole process with trying to figure out what the best option would be starting in 1st grade. As I said before we weren’t really interested at all in public schools, so we looked in to charter schools in our area, and there are a lot, but that would have only really solved the financial aspect of our situation and not really answered the most important reasons for re-evaluating what was best for our family. 

Obviously, that left our main option to be homeschooling. Although, this is something Hubby has been wanting to do for a while, I was hesitant. I didn’t even consider it an option for 2 reasons: I didn’t know what all it would entail and I didn’t feel smart enough. I decided to ask some friends who homeschool if they could share experiences from their homeschooling adventures, I went to a bookstore that sells a lot of homeschool curricula and we prayed and we asked our families to pray. The more we did, the more we decided we wanted to homeschool and if we were going to start homeschooling, why not just start now. 

So last month, we pulled Sweet Girl out of school (really we just let them know that she wouldn’t be going back after Christmas break). We started homeschooling last Monday. Even though we jumped in to homeschooling with both feet, we still had LOTS of questions. We decided to wait on buying curriculum and mostly use free stuff we found online and a few small books for a couple of subjects. 

We took a trip to the library a couple of weeks ago and found some books on homeschooling. One of those books has been an amazing help in answering many of my questions. It’s called: 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum by Cathy Duffy. Yes, I know there are several updated versions, but it’s what they had available at the library. Anyway, this book has helped tremendously in answering many of my questions and I’m not even finished with it. It asks some really important questions and walks you through writing your own Philosophy of Education. It also talks about the different types of homeschooling and asks questions to help you determine what type is best for you. It explains the different learning types as they correlate not only to the child, but also to the parent as a teacher. Then it shares 100 different curricula and walks you through what will be the best options taking all these things into consideration. Then it reviews each of them. 

It’s been so helpful in answering many questions that I felt I should already know when talking with others who have been homeschooling. It’s helped me decide what things we feel are most important to teach and what are the best ways to discover and utilize Sweetie Girls and my learning/teaching styles. How they differ and how they're the same and what will work best for us. It’s gotten me more excited and a little less overwhelmed with all the options out there. 

Being a parent is filled with moments when you put your foot in your mouth and do things you thought you’d never do. I never thought I would be a homeschool mom, I also never thought I’d drive a minivan or have picky or whiny kids, or any number of things. Honestly, the list is just too long. So, here’s our little story on how we came to homeschooling. My plan is to continue to share our adventure, but I haven’t really ever been super successful in my blogging, so no guarantees. 

I’m not saying that this is what we’ll do forever. We’re going to try it out and take it year by year. Life, family, it’s all a journey with many different twists and turns, most of them that we never saw coming. We just trust that God has our best interests in mind and we handle it all to the best of our abilities. 

Here’s to continued research, to experiments, to trial and error and learning as we go. Here’s to our homeschool adventure, no matter where it takes us!