I thought it would be fun to share what we are doing for Gigi's first year of school. She goes to a local charter school that offers learning center classes twice a week, so we then homeschool on the other days. Take a look!
Tuesday/Thursday:
Gigi goes to a full day at the learning center. She takes reading, writing, art and chess one day and drama, Spanish, math and science the other. She loves her school! The classes are multi-level so she is often with K-2 kids although for the core subjects they split them up into level-appropriate groups.
I love that we are connected in the community and that Gigi has the opportunity to play with other kids regularly (various ages) and learn from other teachers.
Monday/Wednesday/Friday:
We generally do an hour of schoolwork in the morning while Hallee is napping/resting and an hour in the afternoon when Hallee and Brody are both napping. It's flexible though, of course, which is one of the things I love about it.
Here's what we are using at home for curriculum:
Long Story Short. This is our church's children's Bible curriculum. The classes go through a story every Sunday and then we have the story Bible at home to review, and also the family devotional, which includes 5 lessons. Ideally we will do all 5 of these at home, but we are still getting ourselves into a routine with it. I'm thinking we'll try to do it in the mornings on MWF during school time, in the evenings with Daddy on Tuesdays, and in the evenings at Community Group on Thursdays.
Five in a Row (FIAR) Volume I. We are loving this literature-based curriculum. We read one book for 2 weeks (since we don't homeschool every day) and do a couple of activities to go along with it each day. The textbook offers activities that cover Language Arts, Social Studies, Art, Math and Science and we often study relevant Bible verses or stories that coincide, too.
Singapore Math. We use the Earlybird Textbook and Activity Book and Gigi loves doing math! I hope to add in more math games and manipulatives as we go.
Handwriting Without Tears. Gigi is only a few letters in on this, but so far I really like the methodology, and she really likes the book and using the slate to write the letters with chalk as well.
The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. This phonics textbook is guiding us through all the sounds and Gigi is really loving the poem it teaches as we go along. We previously tried Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons and it was not a good fit for us. This is working much better.
This week Gigi read the first 2 Bob Books all by herself! This is a great accomplishment considering she had no formal letter/phonics instruction in preschool (which I was totally fine with-- her preschool was a Reggio-Emilia, interest-led, play-based school). She is also getting awesome reading & writing instruction at the learning center.
Bonus!
Last week we wrote a letter to our Compassion child together. It was a great opportunity to study Spanish together (Gigi answered my questions and I translated them to Spanish). We love writing Elian in Spanish even though Compassion has translators. We will do this on a monthly basis. I really want Gigi to connect with Elian since they are just one day apart in age and will hopefully be connected through letter-writing for many years.
So that's what we're up to in our little home school!