Lots of friends have expressed a desire to know what our day looks like or how we structure our homeschool day around here, so I decided to document a day! :) It was much more fun than I expected it to be, I'm happy to report. ha! :) The only thing that wasn't fun about it was that I DROPPED my camera on the floor and broke the door off the slot that holds the memory card. Not a good thing being that it's my main camera. :/ The good news is that it's probably time for it to be serviced anyway so now I have a really great reason to take it in.
Back to business... Every day starts the same around here. Emma gets her charts off the hook and immediately she looks to see what today holds for her. She loves this part. :) We do our subjects in order and as she completes each one, she turns it over. Very tangible. I mentioned this in my last blog and also linked to where I got the idea and the template for making our daily activities. So please refer to that blog if you'd like these charts! :)
She then goes into her drawer where I've stored all her work for the day. She also loves this part... especially when it includes a craft! :)
The first thing we always do is calendar. We talk about the day, the month, year... all that and she writes it on the board in long and short form. Being that we do this everyday she just goes right to the board after she's reviewed her work for the day and does this part automatically. It's great.
Then she has "warm-up" work she does everyday. This is always a short language lesson and a short math lesson. Then on alternating days it's either also a critical thinking activity or a short science lesson. This is another thing we do every day.
This is just how I organize our lessons, in case anyone would like to know. :) I made these charts in Pages, so they're super basic, but it really helps to outline our day each day. We don't do every single subject everyday so the chart on the right just helps me to keep track of what subjects are covered on which days. If any homeschool moms out there would like a copy of my charts, please just email me @ graciejamesphotography@gmail.com and I will gladly email you my planning charts.
The abacus has truly been one of my best purchases yet. We use it every. single. day. in math. Emma loves to use it and I love seeing her use it! :)
While Emma is working on her independent warm-up work, I get Noah started on activities that are very age appropriate for a 3 year old. He mostly does puzzles and fine motor skill activities. He loves them and they are quick so he can move from activity to activity pretty quickly. Because of this, I have a lot of different manipulatives for him so he doesn't get bored and he always has something else to move on to as soon as he's finished with the current thing.
One of the many, many things I love about homeschooling is that Emma gets immediate feedback. She doesn't have to have her paper collected and then wait a few hours or until the next day to get feedback on the work she just did. We discuss every single assignment she does in depth during and immediately following her working time. It's great.
Emma's journal is truly my favorite thing that we do. I found this journal at a really great bookstore at the beach this past summer. I had no idea homeschooling was in our very near future when I bought it, I just knew it was something I really wanted Emma to do. Now I intend to buy them for all my children and I hope so much I can find new ones for them to fill out each year. Stuff like this is so special to me and I know that as she grows, I will love so much looking back over the years and reading her journal writings.
And each time I get Emma busy on her current assignment, I turn to Noah who is always on the floor near me. He prefers that to sitting at his desk. :) And I get him going on something new and different.
Today Emma's journal entry was for her to write about her mom and her dad. She is such a sweet girl and it made tears well up in my eyes to read what she wrote. The second thing she wrote about her dad was how much she misses him when he's at work. :( Thank goodness he's coming home to us next week, because these babies are really missing him!! :)
After journaling, it was time for Emma to have some hands on learning time too. Today she chose to work with her connecting beads, which aren't really a "learning" toy, but I let it slide. She has to watch her brother playing as he learns all day, so I try to let her work with a manipulative of her choice when it's that time of day for her. Today she chose her snap beads.
And she made me some very beautiful jewelry. ;)
Noah working with his pipe connectors...
Math time!! Today's lesson focus was Equal To and Not Equal To...
We do use the Horizons Math Curriculum by Alpha Omega, which I really love and it works well for her. It is a spiraling curriculum, which I was hesitant about, but so far it's working out for us. I'm going to do a post on our curriculum on a different day, so I'll move on... :)
Then it was craft time. Today was just a wood coloring project of a pilgrim. I love AC Moore and their holiday themed dollar crafts for kids. They're great and my kids love them!
I've posted a few pictures of Emma doing this, but we do practice our Spelling words like this daily...
Reading time.... During reading, we do a phonics lesson, then I read a book of her choosing to her, followed by her reading a book of her choosing to me. While she's reading to me, I make flash cards of the words she struggles with and I use those for drilling purposes each day. She also fills out a reading log each day with the books that she reads to me.
Then it was time for a learning game! This is a new learning game for Emma called SepToys. Very, very cool and very, very HARD game! I was disturbed to find that I could not for the life of me figure it out, yet my first grader totally loved it and was engrossed in it within minutes! I was horrible at Geometry in school, though, so I can understand why it was difficult for me, I just was blown away by how taken Emma was with it. Smart girl!! :)
If you look at the picture to the far left closely, you'll notice big fat crocodile tears on Noah's cheeks. I broke his heart by not letting him destroy Emma's geometric creations (above) and instead making him play an age appropriate learning game for him. He was only sad for about 30 seconds though and then he discovered he loved finding the letters to make these words!! :)
So, there ya go, folks! A day in our homeschool life. Everyday looks completely different for us, though, as the only things we do every single day are calendar, warm-ups, math, and reading. Everything else is done sporadically spaced throughout the week. We love it this way and it is the best thing that's happened to us! I'd love any questions or comments. I hope I didn't ramble too much, but I figured it'd be easier to blog it out this way rather than to try and lay out what we do for a lot of different friends in emails. :)
