One: A Meme Post

I was tagged by Steph over at Confessions of an Erratic Homeschooling Mom for this one. Tag me back if you continue it. I'd love to read your posts.

1. One homeschooling book you have enjoyed: Homeschooling: The Early Years by Linda Dobson. This gave me a great start and talked about the different philosophies and encouraged us to go our own way.

2. One resource you wouldn't be without: The Internet :)

3. One resource you wish you had never bought: Science kits from The Young Scientist Club. I really need to not buy things like this unless I have plans to use them immediately. My oldest at least generally doesn't have the motivation to get them out and use them on his own, not when the computer is sitting right there. We have remaining a stack of about 20 of these kits (it was a monthly subscription) that we have yet to use, and it was a bit difficult to cancel once I decided to end it. Maybe someday we'll get to all of them...

4. One resource you enjoyed last year: Gleamer at Raw Learning for planning so many great field trips.

5. One resource you will be using next year: I'm adding "New" to this since we'll still be doing field trips with Raw Learning. This year we're adding curricula from Oak Meadow. I'm looking forward to continuing to explore and learn with it with the kids.

6. One resource you would like to buy: Oh, I can't just stick to one here, but some of the things on my wish list for homeschooling are a butterfly garden, Horrible Histories, and The Waldorf Book of Poetry.

7. One resource you wish existed: A group of secular homeschoolers in my small hometown. I've been able to hook up with homeschooling parents of younger kids (my daughters' ages) here in town (although not too many secular ones), but we have had to drive to meet up with kids any older, enough so that I often wish we moved closer to them, even though I like my town for the most part.

8. One homeschool catalog you enjoy reading: Rainbow Resource Catalog. Are there any others? Honestly, if there are, I don't get them. The one marketing thing I could use, and I somehow missed the mailing list.

9. One homeschool website you use regularly: Facebook and Google probably give me all the information I need. I really don't use any one regularly, although I might be visiting the Oak Meadow web site more as the school year rolls on. Now, e-mail lists, I have plenty of those!

10. Tag six other homeschoolers: I'm still exploring the homeschool blogosphere, so I'll be sure to tag some friends as a note in this post  as a note on Facebook :)

First Day of School

On a whim, we started school today. After I realized that planning was getting overwhelming, I thought that that maybe we should start things a little more slowly instead of jumping in headfirst with all subjects at once. I also haven't gotten all the supplies we need for every subject for the first few weeks, and it might be a while before I can. So, I thought why not start with what we can do?

The kids all agreed, so off we go!

I started Monday evening reading Peter Rabbit to my girls. Then, we did circle time while breakfast was cooking, and I made a grand discovery! I've got a budding singer on my hands. Lily (4) loved doing the rhymes Lucy Locket and Little Miss Muffett. She had the first memorized before the morning was over.

Ginny (3) tried them, too. They both sounded adorable! I had to really watch our candle, which we light at the start of circle time and blow out when it's done. Ginny is still a bit too young to realize that she needs to be careful, but it went all right. A.J (10). even joined us to blow out the candle together.

Ginny, posing while we did our drawing. She's a ham for the camera.

 After breakfast and cleanup, we did the drawing exercise, focusing on the letter A. My drawing was of a garden gate, as in the Oak Meadow Kindergarten Syllabus. Lily seemed a little intimidated by it at first, but I encouraged her, gave her a few tips, about filling up the page and drawing the A in the gate, and told about how the word gate has the long A sound. I love it that she took what I said and still put her own spin on it, filling up the page with A gates. Forget the garden! Well, the point of this exercise is to make the letters real and tangible to them, which her practice was certainly doing. Also, in the evening, we took a walk on our town greenway and looked for As in nature and made As with sticks. She brought home bunches of dry leaves and sticks to add to our yard. It seems we don't have enough :)

My version of the A gate, as a guide.

Lily's completed picture. It's hard to see, but it's covered with yellow A gates.

A.J. and I also began our exploration of Scratch, MIT's free software for kids to teach them computer programming. They have some videos on their web site that help kids get started. A.J. learned how to choose and delete "Sprites," how to change their colors, and how to use effects on them, such as swirl and brighten that are initiated by mouse movement or space bar clicks. He really seemed to enjoy it and had a big grin on his face. The videos really only served as a starting point; once he got the idea, he was off and running.

A.J. getting his first taste of programming.

Ambitious

Whew. I finally got a draft of the first week's K and 5 schedules, based on the Oak Meadow curricula, written up for the kids. I am going to have to keep reminding myself to relax, breathe deep, and just see how it goes. I wonder if I shouldn't change it from a schedule to more of a checklist, moving on to the next area when we've finished the first? Maybe ease into it more? As I said, I'm just going to relax and see how it goes. It does look fun. And I'm sure we'll be spending more time outside and doing fun things like making letters out of bread :)

Well, this is what we're looking at for week 1 (which will probably be the first week of September). I want to have 2 or 3 weeks planned ahead of time. It's important, especially since I figured out today that the first reader was missing from my fifth grade set, and I had to order it. These things are bound to happen. As you can see, there is a blank or two to be filled in, as well.

Kindergarten Week 1:

Subject	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Notes
Circle Time	Opening verse Songs/fingerplays	Field trip day	Opening verse Songs/fingerplays	Opening verse Songs/fingerplays	Opening verse Songs/fingerplays	Start seasonal table
Morning Main Lesson (LA/SS/Math)	Review story/draw A Do A tongue twister		Do A tongue twister Go outside and gather sticks to tie in bundles and make As	Do A tongue twister Find tree branch As and tie a string to make As.	Do A tongue twister Walk and run the letter A Look for other As.	Creative play stations
Afternoon Hour (Arts, Crafts, Science, Music, and Health)	Recall summer/draw a picture of summer Press flowers to recall summer		Make bread snakes	Music/Movement: Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes and another song or finger play.	Health: Parts of the body.
Bedtime Story	“The Tale of Peter Rabbit” by Beatrix Potter

Notes

Supplies: crayons, flowers, recipe ingredients, Wee Sing CD, start gathering fall items for seasonal table.

Grade 5 Week 1:

Subject	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Notes
History/English	Vocabulary/grammar review Read Lesson 1 ("Explorers")	Field trip day	Intro to writing assignment/research	1. Plant shadow stick/measure 2. Observe North Star and night sky and note impressions	Spelling
Science	Read Science Lesson 1 (“Scientific Inquiry”)		Bird observation/ hypotheses/design experiment		1. Conduct bird experiment 2. Night sky poem/picture
Math				Lesson 1 to Skill A ("Common Denominators")	Remainder of Lesson 1 ("Lowest Common Denominators"
Computer Science			Scratch
Cooking					Pick a recipe or do bread with girls
Independent Work/Reading/ Writing/ Projects	Collect bird pictures and arrange by beak type	Read CC	Writing assignment

Notes

CC: Where Do You Think You’re Going, Christopher Columbus? by Jean Fritz

Supplies: Bird pictures, encyclopedia, globe, stick, measuring tape, colored pencils and/or watercolors, recipe ingredients

I'm also stopping to tell myself right now to not be upset if the kids don't appreciate the work I put into this. They have a different perspective about this. I put this together for me, anyway, the schedule, that is. I don't want to be grasping or grossly unprepared when it's time to start. I am also open to spending more time on some topics and less on others, depending on the kids' interest. I'm already worried that DS will be bored with the math, even though we're using Oak Meadow Math 7 (7th grade). We may have to skip ahead to the more complicated stuff, depending on how he does.

I am also willing to take the very un-Waldorfish approach (from the little I know of Waldorf, anyhow) of using an Internet encyclopedia and letting DS do some of his writing on the computer if he wishes. We'll take things one step at a time.