HS: September

We have finished our first month of homeshooling!  It has been awesome.  It's still so crazy to me sometimes that we are doing this but it also feels so normal and exactly how it's supposed to be for our little family.  I am really loving it.  It is incredibly rewarding to watch Jacob's growth and the little victories that we have.  I feel like I am understanding him more through teaching him. 

Our first month we definitely did some major shifting around.  The biggest switching around was curriculum.  I ended up switching our phonics/language arts program and science program.  I found a different one that I love and find myself looking at it all the time.  Jacob also is really liking the switch and I think it is just a much better fit. 

We've definitely had to tweak other things but when I think of where we are at compared to a month ago, it feels like we've been doing this a lot longer.  We are definitely finding our groove and if I could just figure out a more effective way of managing Sarah and Benjamin while doing school we will be SOLID!

I wanted to do a little recap of what we are doing every month (completely for my own benefit) and also, so I have a place to put some of the fun pictures I sometimes take while doing school.  This is, obviously, a major part of our life now and I would hate to not document it.  

So here is our recap for September (plus the last week of August)!

We switched language arts curriculums so that shook things up.  Jacob is currently working through the preschool book in this curriculum because I wasn't quite sure if he was ready for the kindergarten yet.  He is breezing through and we should be done with the preschool book by the beginning of November.  We have reviewed letters A - J with their letters and sounds and rhyming words. 

I also added handwriting, which I hadn't initially planned on.  This has been great and even though Jacob has beautiful handwriting, I've found that he was making a lot of letters and numbers "incorrectly" and so we are refining some things there.  Plus, he actually loves the handwriting program that we do because at the end of each page is a picture that he gets to color or a prompt for him to color a picture - WIN!

Math has been going well.  Jacob is flying through what we have done so far.  It has definitely all been review, but this next month I think we will enter some new territory.  I am really liking the program so far though and I think Jacob is too.  We finished our first chapter which was all about Numbers to 5.  We talked about the numbers one through five, what makes things the same, different, and matching.  We are in the middle of our second chapter which is about Numbers to 9.  We have talked about numbers six through eight, and making pairs.  Easy peasy for my man. 

Science was another big switch up with our curriculum.  There were things I was definitely not enjoying about our initial science curriculum and our new one seemed pretty advanced but I have been amazed at how well Jacob is doing with it.  I have always felt that kids {usually} rise or fall based on our expectations - and Jacob has definitely risen!  Science is all unit studies and I am really enjoying it!  It may be my favorite subject we do (which if you knew me growing up, science was ALWAYS my least favorite subject, so that's saying something!). 

We started our first unit about arthropods.  Do you know that arthropods are?  Because I did NOT!  It's all about insects, spiders, and crustaceans.  It is actually fascinating and I definitely learn new things every time we do it.  We are still towards the beginning of the unit but we have learned some new vocabulary words like: invertebrate, exoskeleton, and cold blooded.  We learned the difference between invertebrates and vertebrates, made a venn diagram about insects and arachnids, identified the different parts of an insect, and did some "insect stations" where we learned about mosquitoes, fireflies, termites and silkworms.  It's been SO interesting.  Jacob also decided that he wanted to do a presentation on praying mantises so that will be fun to work on together this month.

making termite mounds

Now, to Jacob's favorite subject - ART!  Jacob loves when we do an art project!  The first art project was called "Color Mixing Hands".  We talked all about the primary colors (or Super Hero Colors as we call them) and secondary colors (or sidekick colors).  Our next project was called "Happy Sun" which was good practice for Jacob cutting.  Next was our Van Gogh Sunflowers.  I really liked this project and thought Jacob's turned out AWESOME.  Last, was our Symmetrical Butterfly that we did today.  This was a great project to learn about symmetry and practice some more cutting.  This boy loves his art!

Color Mixing Hands

Happy Sun

Van Gogh Sunflowers

Symmetrical Butterfly

Finally, we do read alouds together.  In August, we read Charlotte's Web by E. B. White aloud as a family and that was lots of fun.  This month, we read A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond.  I had never read this one before and I think we both really enjoyed it.  We even watched the movie that came out recently afterwards, which I must admit, Jacob liked a lot more than I did - but it was still fun to kind of compare the two.