Homeschool... the ups and downs

So... yeah... we started Pre-K, and the first week was fantastic. On Monday of the second week we were in the middle of doing school and got a call to go pick up a foster child. We finished our school while we waited on our call-back to say for sure we should go get him. We picked him up and it turned out that he is 2 instead of 1 :) That was at the end of June. He is 3 now, and still with us. So that week of school was a little more difficult, but we got it done. Day 1, Week 3, we are doing school and get a phone call about more foster children. 3 month old twins (one boy, one girl). I was so excited about babies I couldn't stand it! :) I said yes, and we went to get them. I'm not even sure if we finished that week of school or not, but needless to say I was OVERWHELMED with 5 children under 4 with 4 of them in diapers. The twins were both on oxygen and were considered "medically fragile" so to say that I had my hands full was an understatement. SO... I gave up on school... I just completely caved. I didn't even try to come up with solutions, I just quit. I hate to admit that about myself because I don't think I'm a quitter, but I did with this. I just quit!
Fast forward a little over 4 months, the twins are gone, and I'm wondering why I didn't think we were strong enough to do this. We had a great Halloween and now we're looking forward to Thanksgiving and going home for Christmas. We're also doing school again... I realize now that I should have allowed myself to just take a break instead of quitting all-together. I still have the Sonlight Curriculum, and I LOVE it! :) So that's what we're doing. We're going back and starting over and now that we still have our 3 year old foster child, we've included him in the lessons. They are both LOVING it, and we're having a lot of fun.
Lesson Learned: Think before you act!! AND Give myself a "rest" period when we get new foster children!!

First Day of Preschool

Today was our first day of preschool... using our new curriculum and it took us about an hour or maybe an hour and a half, and that included reading some while we ate breakfast. I'll post our pictures tomorrow... we had a great first day, and he kept asking if we could do a lot more school stuff.

Preschool 2008-2009

I have received the preschool curriculum from Sonlight Curriculum (I'll post the link later) and I think it will be fantastic. We are going to begin school on Monday, and I can't wait.
The study is called Exploring God's World... and it has every day planned out and what pages we need to read in each book on that specific day. I will update weekly and hopefully, we'll be able to see his progress. I'm so ready for school to start!!

Some Stuff

We've been doing school the whole time... I just can't keep up with the posting that I was doing. My friend Amy suggested that I look into Sonlight curriculum, and gave me a catalog. Well.... it has been life-changing. Here I was completely prepared to plan out all of our school, and even had a lot of ideas about that. The only problem was that I may very soon be adding two little boys to our family, and I was freaking out about having the kind of planning time that I need now, much less adding more subjects and more projects to do... so... Sonlight is a perfect choice for us. We are going to do the P 4/5 core with K Readers. He can already read so many words that I hate to not do any reading next year, so we're going to do the K readers. They are little books and he'll be able to easily finish them, and hopefully get some confidence in his reading ability. He's a little frustrated right now because he can't read The Chronicles of Narnia books. I guess he thought we would do school for a few days and then he'd be able to read these huge books. He told me the other day that he didn't want to learn how to read, and since he's young and I don't want him to get burnt out, we're going to learn our letters and do some word reading, but no more story readings like we have been doing.
Another thing that I like about Sonlight is that everything will be already planned out for me, and all I will have to do is get the books out that we are supposed to read each day. That's pretty much it. We still have to order the core... we haven't done that yet, but we're going to get it the beginning of May. I won't be able to see it until we come back home in June, about a month before school starts. I'm so excited for all of the many changes that are coming in the next few months for our family. I'll try to update every week or every couple of weeks until we officially start our PreKindergarten year.
Oh... Price can count to 30 in English, 10 in Spanish, and he knows six colors in spanish! I'm so proud. He knows how to write his name all by himself, and he knows our phone number and address!!

Weekly Report, Week Two

Tuesday - We had a great day on Tuesday... we did everything we wanted to get accomplished. I think I'm only going to be able to update every week instead of every day. I just don't have enough time. So... I'll be back Friday to update for this week.
Monday - Today we had a fabulous trip to Garden of the Gods... if you EVER get a chance to come to Colorado Springs... you have to go there. It is free!! And it is absolutely beautiful. These pictures are pretty good, but they aren't anything like seeing it in person. Our house is open... just call! When we got home, we were all very tired, but I was determined to start spanish today. We did everything we had planned, and it made me feel really good to hear him counting to five in spanish to his daddy tonight. We'll be doing numbers for the next two weeks, then we move onto something else. Hopefully, he'll be able to count to ten by the time we're done, and we're going to try to always talk to him in spanish as much as we can (we don't know that much). We did take a little time to read some books today. We read Transformers, Tractors & Trucks, Emergency, and The Lion King. I'm excited about tomorrow because he doesn't have school anymore, so he'll be here all day. I'm making a slide show of today's pictures because there are so many. The slideshow is on the main page. www.chaplainwife.blogspot.com go check it out.
Memorization: phone number and address, AWANA verse
Bible: Read and discuss story
Language Arts: 100 EZ Lessons 32,33,34,35 and 36, do letter work for t and r
Science: Talk about our nature walk to Garden of the Gods
Art: Do handprint color mixing. (we didn't do this last week, so we're repeating)
Reading:
Books to Read: Transformers, Eels, Tractors & Trucks, Emergency, Winnie-the-Pooh, Thomas & Percy and the Dragon, Stories from "High Five" magazine, Ruby Bridges, Track Stars, Rosa Parks, Look & Learn Body, The Lion King (and DVD), Each Peach Pear Plum, And to Think I Saw it On Mulberry Street, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Horton Hatches the Egg, Yertle the Turtle, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Munschworks Grand Treasury (15 different stories)
Price and Daddy Books:
The Horse and His Boy
Outings/Other Activities:
Monday (Field Trip to Garden of the Gods), Wednesday (Bible Study and lunch with church playgroup), Thursday (Gymnastics), Saturday (Gymnastics), Sunday (Church and AWANA)

Weekly Report, Week Two

Wednesday: We don't have any pictures from today, but we didn't have bible study because it is Spring Break, so we went to the park with some friends, then we came home and he did his reading words and read his story. We did have time to read Arkansas this morning during breakfast. I do have a picture of the reading words, but I'm not adding it until I have more pictures to download. Wednesday's are our slowest days, and tomorrow we get to do art... yay!!

Tuesday: We read Amelia Bedelia, Ants, and Baby's Book of Animals. We didn't have time to read a lot today because we had to get to our "outing" today. Price liked the Ant book, and neither of us liked Amelia Bedelia very much. It was crazy! We went to a Spring Break show at the library in Fountain. It was fantastic even though we didn't get to stay the whole time. Wesley was a little crazy... I had to chase him around the whole time, but Price laughed as loud as he could! I loved seeing him enjoying something so much! Our science experiment today was "fog in a bottle". It kind of stunk because it didn't work. I'm sure I did something wrong, and Price didn't seem to care that it didn't work. Maybe we'll try it again later this week. We got new books today that were going to be part of his Kindergarten curriculum, but one of them seems super easy, so I let him do a page today. We're going to go slowly and just do two pages a week. When K starts, we'll do two pages a day, four days a week. This is Book A, and we also bought Book B today. The only one left is Book C, and then he will move to the numbered books.. i.e. Book 1, Book 2, etc...

Monday: We didn't have colored eggs for breakfast this morning. We worked on our phone number and address. He repeated them after me, but then he said they were too hard and he wouldn't know them later. We'll probably work on them again next week if he doesn't have them by the end of the week. We read Atlantis, The Last Empire which took longer than I thought, but we're going to watch the movie tonight, so I wanted to finish it. Price really liked it. Then we cut out letter A words and glued them on our A project page. We tried the rice again this week because Price said if we would just push the rice harder, then it would stick. He was right, and our A looks really good. He did his word reading for today, and then we all took a break for lunch and read more books. We read Animal Parade, Atlantis Squarepantis,
All the Ways I Love You, and Ten Apples up on Top. We read the first chapter in our new Winnie-the-Pooh book, and I think I liked it a lot more than Price. It was probably too long, so we're only going to read half of the chapter tomorrow unless he asks to keep going. We're completely done today, and it went well. He's finished with his two-day-a-week preschool here on base, so he's just going to be mine from now on! Pictures will be added at the end of the post everyday, and then I'll make another slideshow when the week is over.

Memorization: done

Bible: Creation Completed story,

Language Arts: 100 EZ Lessons 28,29,30,31 and do letter work for a and e
Science: Make fog in a bottle
Art: Do handprint color mixing.
History/Geography: Look up our country, state, and city on the map. Learn the name of our continent, and find it on the map
Reading:
Books to Read:
Neil Armstrong
Adventures of Harold & His Friends
John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed)

Price and Daddy Books:
The Horse and His Boy

Outings/Other Activities:
Tuesday (Playgroup Activity at Fountain Library), Wednesday (Bible Study), Thursday (Gymnastics), Friday (Lunch and Playtime with Home School Group), Saturday (Gymnastics), Sunday (Church and AWANA)

Kindergarten Curriculum

I use the word Curriculum loosely of course. We aren't going to be using any curriculum for Kindergarten (except Math). Everything else will be put together and taken from different places. But after all that rambling I realized that it is still a curriculum, so just begin reading here... Sorry for that!

We will begin Kindergarten after our Pre-K is over and we take a two week break. Our last week of Pre-K will be July 7-11. We will take two weeks off, and maybe make a lap book of something (maybe Star Wars or Spiderman) I'll let him pick. We'll just get lots of information and pictures of whatever we choose, and make a lapbook. Just do lots of reading about whatever subject he picks.
So Kindergarten begins July 28th. We're going to try to touch on every subject, but I'm going to try to be as flexible as possible. Just read as many books as we can, and work on Price learning to read better.
Price's goals for Kindergarten (as determined by me, of course):
1. Price able to read easy reader books aloud to us when we are done with our year.
2. Introduce him to all the subjects, and do a little of all of them throughout our year.
3. Teach him our house rules, (that I blatantly stole from someone else) and have him understand why we have those rules.
4. Continue to read the bible daily, and show/teach him how to pray on his own. We've let him say "memorized" prayers for too long, and I want to change this.
Mommas goals for Kindergarten (hey... I need to learn and grow also!):
1. Stay flexible and don't let my "plan" get in the way of learning.
2. Make learning a fun and memorable experience.
3. Work on my personal goals and take time for me.
4. Read as much as I can about the Trivium, Charlotte Mason, and Classical homeschooling (I know they are similar, but I want the find the best fit for us).

Those are achievable goals, I think... So how are we going to accomplish them. We are going to try to do school for 36 weeks. Some of these things don't last that long, so there will be plenty of time to spend on something that he doesn't get.

Our Subjects and what we'll be using:
Bible
When we start in July, we won't be having AWANA, but we'll have his old book, so we'll probably review some of those verses. We'll be using Beginnings I for our bible study this year. We'll take two weeks on each lesson, and it has daily activities to do. Sometimes it is songs to sing, and sometimes it is an activity. We can get this free online weekly, or pay money for the actual book.
Math
We'll be using the Kindergarten math from Bob Jones Press. I'm getting the student workbook and the teacher's book. I've looked through the student book, and it starts out basic enough (with shapes and stuff) that I think he'll be fine. It is only 32 weeks, so we will have a little flexibility to work longer if we need.
Phonics/Spelling/Grammar
We'll do Explode the Code books A, B, and C (I don't know how long they will take because I don't know how fast he will go through them). Then we're going to start Language Lessons for Little Ones Vol. 2. I just ordered it, so I'm waiting for it to come in. There is a 3rd volume if we need it to finish the year. I'm hoping this will help him in whatever ways he's needing when we finish 100 EZ lessons.
Handwriting
I'm not pushing handwriting. There will be some writing included in his Phonics and Grammar, so I'm not doing anything extra.
Language Arts
We'll be reading stories from the places we study in Galloping the Globe, and we'll be "trying" to read some easy readers. Just LOTS AND LOTS of reading.
Poetry
I'm still trying to decide about this. It will be my next project. I'm leaning towards Harp and Laurel Wreath, but have heard mixed reviews about it. Plus I saw some pretty good children's poetry books at our library, so I might just use those.
Foreign Language
We'll be using Teach Them Spanish K. It seems like a really good book. It begins with Pre-school and goes all the way to 5th or 6th grade. Hopefully we'll have a different one by then, but this seems to be great for now. He'll learn his numbers, colors, animals, food, transportation, parts of the face, and I can't remember what else. Everything is taught in a game format, so I don't think he'll even know that he's learning. I remember the colors at least from college (it is sad that I have 21 hours of Spanish from college, and can barely remember the colors! Pathetic, huh?) Anyway... so he knows a few of his colors, and thanks to Dora and Diego, he knows some of his numbers. I'm just going to try to make this as much fun as possible, and have fun learning along with him.
History
We're going to use Galloping the Globe. It is a geography unit study. It picks a different country/continent every lesson, and gives a lot of information about it. We're going to use it for Science and language arts also.
Science
Galloping the Globe and adding in a few experiments that I think will be fun. I'm not sure what kind of science is in GtG because I haven't seen the actual book, but I'm ordering it soon.
Art
We're going to spend the first 18 weeks, going over general stuff. We'll work on drawing basic shapes, then there are a lot of books called Kids Can Draw... (Animals of the World) and other things like that. So after he is good at drawing and painting the basic shapes, then we'll move onto these books. After the first 18 weeks, then we're going to start using Artistic Pursuits (I'm not very good with adding links right now because it takes a while... so just do a search for any books I mention, and I'm sure you'll be able to find them). AP looks like a great book and the good news is that there are three books that should last from K-3rd grade. We're going to go as slowly as we need to get through them. It suggests doing one lesson every week, but there are 32 lessons in each book, so we have almost one whole year extra. We'll be taking it very slowly. AP not only teaches different techniques, it also teaches them some art history. Not anything too in-depth, but if there is something that interests us in the book, then we'll get more books from the library to tell us more about it.
Music
I found an awesome book... well... I think it's awesome. I haven't actually looked at it, but I'm ready to order it. It's called Themes to Remember. It has three books, and you use those three books and follow their six year plan for music. It is mostly music appreciation, so once he gets big enough to decide what kind of instrument he wants to play, we'll have to find someone to teach him lessons (unless he wants to play the trumpet... I already know that).
Virtue Training Focus
Our Virtues for this year are Respect, Obedience, and Honesty. We'll review last year's virtues Kindness, Helpfulness, and Cooperation the first 9 weeks, then we'll spend 9 weeks on each of the new ones. We'll read as many books about these virtues as we can. We'll try for a few a week (if we can find that many).
That's it. I haven't figured out any kind of schedule yet because I don't have all the books, so I don't want to estimate how long I think each lesson will last. I think we're going to try to start out doing the same schedule everyday with the weekly things added in depending on what they are, but we'll mix it up if we need to. I'm going to do my best to be flexible with this, but that isn't really my personality when it comes to "organizing" things, but then again.. that is one of my goals.