New School Year

Well, our homeschool year is off to a rolicking start!  I managed to get two kids off to public school, make our homeschooling schedule and actually stick to it, all with a wild 3 year old under foot.

 

Let's start with the three year old.

 

He is SO much easier to work with this year.  First of all, he is beginning to be able to do little activities for more than 30 seconds at a time.  I've started having rug time with him.  We have a big oval rug in the living room and I set out 4 different preschool activities for him.  I set the timer for 15 minutes and if he gets off the rug, I patiently steer him back "until the timer beeps."  So far so good.

 

He loves puzzles and is quite good with these:  Lauri Construction Puzzles  and Lauri Perception Puzzles.  He also played quite a long time one day with the Lauri Pegs.  Can you tell we're Lauri fans??

 

The girls are taking turns playing with him while I work one-on-one with the other.  Here he is making dinosaur tracks with Daisy.

 

As for Daisy & Pepper, their first day began with wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Both started out with bad attitudes and cries of "too much work!!  Too hard!"  Apparently they've gotten rusty over the summer.  After a little chat with Mr. GT (who was home because it was Labor Day) their attitudes improved and we had no more trouble the rest of the week.

 

As usual, their favorite subject is history and they can't wait for me to read to them each day.  We are reading Toliver's Secret and they really are enjoying this exciting story of the Revolutionary War.  Daisy is reading through our Sonlight Core 3 shelf.  She just finished The Corn Grows Ripe and is reading Vostaas.

 

Daisy is finishing up Singapore 3B in math and was inspired to fly through the section on capacity and completed about 8 lessons in 4 days.

 

She also learned this useful skill (the trick is to do it with your eyes OPEN!

 

 

Pepper reluctantly did math, Explode the Code and her states.  As I've mentioned before, she's a really good unschooler.  Workbooks give her hives.  Unfortunately, for the time being she is stuck with them.  Eventually I'd like to be able to give her more hands-on, activity-based learning.  The math games we did this summer worked really well for her.