A Time to Play

I have been very dissatisfied lately with how our school time had been going. I was not enjoying planning Caleb's lessons because I knew they were not appropriate for him. I was not motivated to teach the lessons, and he was not motivated to do the lessons. Caleb is fully capable of doing the entire Sonlight K curriculum, it is just not what I consider appropriate curriculum for his age. So I have been doing a lot of soul searching about what I want our days to be like. The end result of a lot of tough nights deliberating with myself, I decided that I want to embrace these precious young years. I packed up all of his Sonlight curriculum except his math (which he LOVES), and his Fun Tales early readers books. We will continue with all of our calendar time activities which includes prayer, pledge, songs, calendar activities, weather, and ABC review. We will also continue using only the Bible portion of Hubbard's Cupboard preschool curriculum. Beginning in November we will also be using some fun literature focused activities from Itty Bitty Bookworm. I am thankful that God has given me the wisdom to not waste these days. I am thankful for the opportunity to teach my children at home. And I am thankful that by doing so I have the freedom to make changes along the way to best meet the needs of our precious gifts.

So, here is a glimpse of what our week was like...

We mostly just reviewed Bible stories and memory verses. We are really just in a restructuring phase right now. Caleb did lots of Math worksheets and always amazes me how fast he catches on.

Hannah loved tracing these letter cards then wiping them clean to do again later. This is a great fine motor exercise as well as practice learning her letters.

I pulled out some preschool worksheets to do with Hannah and she was THRILLED! She told Caleb to go away, she was doing her Kindergarten! She asks for these all day and never wants to stop. She insists on writing her name on Every page. To my surprise she wrote her name rather well by herself. I had only seen her write "H" and attempt "a".

This is a picture of how Hannah wrote her name completely be herself. It doesn't always come out this well, but I am impressed! She also is making some sudden progress in letter recognition.

Caleb got to read Book 1 from his Fun Tales early readers this week.

At first he had trouble realizing there were two words and not just one long word on the page so I showed him to cover up one word.

He was so proud of himself. I was proud of him too.

This week was our monthly filed trip to Reed Creek Park. Caleb was very interested in the turtle named "Elvis" on display this month.

The theme this month was spiders so they got to make a spider craft after our nature walk.

We ended the week with a first for all four of us...pumpkin carving. Caleb and Hannah will be Mickey and Minnie Mouse for Halloween so Ron carved Mickey and Minnie pumpkins. The kids got to wash the pumpkins and scoop out the "guts". They turned out really cute.

We also had a FUN football week!