This Week at School

I have made mention before that we are a homeschooling family. Sometimes I don't think I deserve to say that yet because we are so new to it. However, that is a direction we have embarked upon so I guess that does make us a homeschooling family to whatever degree. I am not going to get into the rhyme or reason as to how we took this road less traveled because that is not my focus. There are lots of fantastic homeschooling blogs out there though. I swear without them I would be lost.

There are many different parts of our life in our happy family and homeschooling just happens to be one of them. So far it's working out well. I have a general schedule to follow, sometimes we are off and sometimes we are on. With three kids 5 and under that is just how the dice rolls.

With all that being said I am coming to my point. I am going to begin a regular Friday post that will be a re-cap of what we did at school this week. I didn't take any pictures this week but in the upcoming weeks I certainly hope to so that I can show some memorable highlights of our week.

This week happened to actually mark our official start of our homeschooling year. It took me a very long time to decide on a route that I would take regarding curriculum. There isn't a lot of formal curricula for Kindergarten and Pre-school. Yes there are some out there but out of the few options there wasn't anything I particularly liked or saw the value in. Or at least not yet.

So...a few words on curriculum. I put together a pile of resources on my own and am using tons of ideas from various sources. My primary guide though is our provincial curriculum. Along with the provincial curriculum builder I have been able to go through the objectives and goals of the kindergarten year and then have a list of suggested activities or resources with which to accomplish those goals. Based on these provincial guidelines I can also see where we are excelling and where we are lagging behind. I already know that Vik has accomplished several kindergarten outcomes. In years to come I plan to always use a combination of formal and informal curricula. I don't think you get the whole package in one place. There will always be bits and pieces that don't fit with us and that is fine.

I was going to post here what our daily plan consists of but I am toying with the idea of doing that in a post or giving that a page all of it's own. I am leaning towards the latter. Stay tuned for that update.

In the future our school week re-cap will be shorter I promise. This inaugural one though I felt needed an intro. So without further ado here are a few of our highlights:

This week was brought to us by the letters A & B and the numbers 2 & 3. Turns out Mr. Kindergarten can't get enough worksheets. He gobbles them up. For the letters he practiced writing the letter and then doing a few letter find exercises on the first day and then a few letter activities on the second day. His favourite letter activity is using the scrabble letters to spell things. He has such an interest in spelling and reading already. I've led the horse to water and it is drinking the whole pond. We aren't doing a whole lot with Max yet as he is primarily just along for the ride but when Vik is on worksheets Max is colouring in letters and then the activities they both do together. Number worksheets consist of writing the number and spelling the word. There are others that require him to colour or circle the right number of an object. The second day of the number is number activities to reinforce the number.

That covers the core basics of letters and numbers. So next we have social studies and science. As this is the beginning for us we are transitioning slowly into these subjects. This week the boys were slowly introduced to the earth as a whole. We had lots of fun using google earth to look at all sorts of different parts of the world. I loved how on our second day Vik was asking to see France. Next week will be a slow introduction into some science basics then we will begin to delve into a our social studies and science units.

That is some of this week. Doesn't seem like a whole lot but there are also a lot of other bits and pieces of learning that gets done throughout the day. Next week will see the introduction of the fun subjects of art and music as well as physical education/health and religion. I look forward to updating next Friday what we did at school this upcoming week. I'll have pictures for sure.

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.  ~Stacia Tauscher