Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Big News!

Jayden is officially finished with Kindergarten! I know that I said we expected to be done by his birthday. That went out the window when he started asking to do more and more work. We finished last Thursday. Today we began our first grade unit in Time 4 Learning.

This is how our last week has gone:












 Indoor playground playdate











Swimming




 Library
Singing at the library



 Frosty pit stop!


 Carolyn is the COOL mom. She set up a mess station and let the kids TEAR up her kitchen, living room AND play room!









 Today:





















 Pausing school to open a package from Titi Des!


















 I set this up over our table. Every Monday I will update it for the week.
 Last weeks lessons in lapbook format.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

This past week!

I keep trying to remember to update daily, or at least every other day, but somehow a whole week passes and I find myself scrambling to get everything in order to post again!

This past week we signed Jayden up for a ridiculously wonderful program called Time 4 Learning. He has one more math chapter and one more language arts chapter to complete before officially moving on to the first grade. Each chapter has 4-5 lessons so he should be done before February! We will be moving right along to the first grade material, which we have already been doing for quite some time now. We stepped back to kindergarten work for a bit because when I signed up for T4L, I discovered there were a few things miniscule things that I had missed, like teaching him the parts of a book cover before teaching him to read! So far both Jayden and I REALLY love this program!

Caitlin has officially begun "real" work. She used to be content with tracing pages in her workbooks and watching her educational shows. I was/am fine with that since she just turned 3. Lately she has been expressing a greater interest in one on one work with me, so I have decided, once again, to split school up and teach the children separately. She and I are using the Letter of the Week program. I have come across several websites with printable worksheets to supplement our lessons, as well as several miscellaneous worksheets for her (teaching about patterns, animals, etc.)

I am also starting a great new geography/history curriculum found at Confessions of a Homeschooler. We have a map on the way to add to our wall, a new LeapFrog Tag Map of the US, and our curriculum. We will be purchasing an Atlas and probably a globe before we begin.

Apart from that we will also be starting an official Spanish class and a unit on the 6 Pillars of Character (trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, citizenship).

Without further ado, here are pictures of our last week!
















Caitlin's "A", "1" and her attempt at a square!





























Our Valentines Board



Today's library haul