Well we’re into month three of our homeschool journey and while we’ve had our fair share of frustrating moments (ok sometimes frustrating days), I’d say for the most part, it’s been going really well for all of us. In fact, I’m loving it and I think (I hope) the boys are too.

I thought I would share a few things that I’ve been learning thus far as we’ve been going along.

Mama Time = Necessary!

When you’re with your kids all day and all night long, 7 days a week, you NEED to carve time out for yourself. It can be so easy to get so caught up in our schedule and routines that I actually forget to do this and then I wonder why I’m feeling so drained and getting so easily agitated by the littlest things. I’m so thankful to have a husband that is on board with the decision to homeschool and also supports me running a business from home. He’s really sensitive to knowing when I need a break and if I forget to call it, he’ll send me out for the evening or a couple hours on a Saturday to do something for myself. Maybe meeting up with some girlfriends or getting a pedicure. Or sometimes it’s literally just grabbing a coffee at starbucks while I respond to some e-mails in peace and quiet or ya know just scrolling through pinterest. Whatever it is, I always come back feeling refreshed and ready to be “mom/teacher” again. I’ll add here too that being with my kids full time, investing so much of myself into them, I need to be working on things that fuel my own soul as well. My job, believe it or not, fuels my soul. Taking photos is my creative outlet so getting out for a photo shoot is also a breath of fresh air for me. It keeps me excited about life and allows me to pursue something that I’m passionate about. So important.

Also, even though our boys have pretty much dropped their nap, (They probably nap 1-2 times per week) I still send them to their room for quiet time each afternoon for about 1.5 hours. They start with a short rest time and they they are allowed to play quietly with puzzles, lego, play mobile etc., This promotes independent play while also giving me some time to think in quiet, maybe eat some lunch? get a little work done or somedays (while I’m pregnant) take a little rest time myself.

No Set Kindergarten Curriculum

I shared in the summer how we would be taking more of an un-schooling, unscripted approach with our schooling and while I was pretty confident in my decision, I did worry a bit that it wouldn’t go as planned or that I would regret my approach. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that I have a Type A personality and thrive on being organized and prepared ahead of time so letting go of the reins a bit to be more flexible and allow the interests of my children to guide our learning has been somewhat of a challenge for me. But overall, my kids seem to be thriving with this way of doing things and I’m adapting to the flexible, unscripted approach too! We do have a few books and resources that I’ve collected over the past couple months that I pull from for activities but nothing rigid that we are set on following.

We also do have a few basic daily routines in place such as our “morning time” during breakfast each day where we do our devotional and calendar. We also focus on a new letter each week (learning the sound and how to write it, big case and lower case) and a weekly memory verse that goes a long with it. But everything else is very spontaneous. I leave lots of room for learning based on their interests and also what sort of mood they’re in. If I’m finding the boys are very active one afternoon and I know they’ll have a hard time sitting down and focusing on the work-sheet I planned to give them, I’m learning to be flexible and pull out or make up an educational game or hands-on activity to do together instead. I mentioned in my last homeschool post that one of my main goals for this year is to instill a love for learning into my kids so if they’re not enjoying what we’re working on, we’ll move on or leave it for the time being and pick it up again later.

I thought I would share the list of books and resources I do have and pull from periodically:

• The Kindergarten Tool Kit  – love this kit so much! the boys really enjoy using chalkboards and white boards for letter and number practice. It’s nice to switch it up from pencil and paper and the kit also comes with a set of number and letter cards and a book of great hands-on activities.
• Kindergarten Learning Essentials: Math, Reading, Writing. – I found this book at Walmart believe it or not and it’s amazing! It was created based on the learning expectations of the Canadian Kindergarten Curriculum and it’s the book I pull most of their work-sheets from, most often for letter of the week but also for math, as it goes through everything they need to know for jk (patterning, measurement, number sense and numeration etc.,)
• Kumon – My book of numbers 1-30 – I haven’t used this book too much yet but probably will more in the new year once my kids can write numbers 1-10 really well.  it focuses on number recognition and formation of numbers 1-30.
• Gotta Have God – Fun Devotional For Boys ages 3-5 – I picked this up a month into school when we started implementing our morning time during breakfast and the boys just love it! The devotionals are only a page long and each one focuses on a moral, value or character trait: eg., generousity, joyfulness, trust, manners etc., with a little story, verse and prayer to go a long with it. There is also an optional hands-on activity to do if we have time or feel up to it.
• Calendar and Weather Cards This has been great little tool for teaching the boys the months and days of the week. It’s also great for us to talk about what we’re doing that particular day and order the activities together.
• Number And Letter Chart  – Great for reference in our classroom if the boys forget how to write a certain letter or number when we’re doing an activity. I also have them count the number chart with our pointer to see how far they go. They love this activity!
• Our Local Resource Lending Library – our local Toy and Resource Lending library has been incredible for homeschooling. They have so many educational kits all labeled by theme, season, subject etc., so we’ve been taking advantage of this and making a trip there several times each month. If you’re a homeschooling family, it’s worth checking if they have something similar in your town or city!
• Pinterest – As you know, there are SO many fun hands-on education activities on Pinterest. Whenever I’m feeling like I need something quick and fun to get us away from book work, the options are endless. I love you Pinterest.

The importance of connecting with other Homeschoolers: 

I’ve been discovering that this is so so important! It can be super easy to feel secluded and alone in this journey of homeschooling if you don’t make a point of getting out and connecting with other homeschoolers through the week. It can be in a larger group setting or just small play dates but i’ve been realizing that homeschooling community is KEY! We are blessed to have a solid group of close friends who homeschool along side us and this makes it all the more enjoyable and fun! You need other moms to chat with and share ideas and resources with. You need community. You need a support system in place. Through the fall, we did a weekly nature group with this core group of friends and through the winter we plan to continue to do field trips and other outings together.

Not comparing our family to other Homeschool families.

The comparison trap for anything in life is so easy to get caught up in without realizing it. I sometimes find myself starting to get a little anxious when for example, someone else’s child, the same age as mine can print their letters better, or is already starting to read etc., etc., Or perhaps, I’m just seeing or hearing about another mom doing what sounds like more exciting and interesting activities with her kids. It’s easy to quickly feel like you’re failing or not doing enough when you’re the one responsible for your child’s education. But hello, it’s kindergarten. And one of my main reasons for homeschooling in the first place was to allow my children to learn and progress at their own pace. Comparing my children to others or expecting them to do more than they’re ready to, isn’t good for any of us. Our journey with homeschooling is our own and I plan to keep it that way.

Leave lots of Unscheduled Time 

Other than the sports I have the boys enrolled in, nature group with our homeschool friends, bible study mornings, and the odd play date through the week, I’ve been finding that we all enjoy having more unscheduled time than not. At first, I wanted to have something planned for every day to get us out of the house. And while it normally works out this way even if just for an hour, the few empty mornings and afternoons we have each week together seem to be all of our favourite days. The boys LOVE to have p.j. days where we don’t have to rush out the door to be somewhere and can enjoy a lazy morning in our school room working away in our p.j.s. That’s one of the best parts of homeschooling in my opinion!

So that’s just a few things that I’ve been learning in the first few months of our homeschool journey. We’re having so much fun with it! And I think that’s all that really matters this first year. Thanks for reading you guys!

Well, we’re one week into homeschooling and so far, we’re LOVING it. So far! Believe it or not, teaching is something that really excites me! I love lesson planning and preparing fun activities and while we’re taking a more casual un-schooling approach for junior kindergarten, i’m still adding in mini-lessons here and there.  I wasn’t quite sure how our school days would look and figured we play around with things that first week. And that we did. As I shared in my last post, my main goal for the year is to instil a love of learning into my children. Most of the time, I want them to be learning without even realizing it.

I prepared each of my boys two binders for the year. One for their “work” and one for art. My kids LOVE to do art. I did a ton of photocopying at the end of the summer and each Sunday, I insert the work I want us to cover that week into each of their binders (it’s not a lot at all as my approach is more hands on learning, less book work). While I make a rough outline of an activity to do each day, I’m really flexible with when it get’s done, as long as it get’s done by the end of the week! We have been doing about 20 min of focused “school time” each day but the timing for when we do this is different each day depending on what we have on the go. Some days it will be first thing in the morning but if we have nature group,  swimming lessons or a play date that morning, we might do our “school time” after lunch or even after nap/quiet time. But the boys have been excited about it and remind me saying “mom we haven’t done our school time yet” if it’s later in the day.

While my kid’s have great letter recognition and can print a lot of them on their own, we’re still focusing on a different letter each week, to perfect their printing and ensure they know all their sounds in preparation for reading.

I designed this little planner to help me with my planning on the weekends and also to keep as a record each week in my teacher binder of what her have accomplished. I have a section at the bottom for a to-do list for mama’s and also a section to keep a running list of my kids interests for future lesson planning. That section is key for me with our un-schooling approach as I want the topics we learn about (besides phonics and math work) to really reflect their interests.

For kindergarten memory verses, our verse each week corresponds with the letter of the week. I will provide a separate printable for this soon!

Happy homeschool planning! You can print yours here: Homeschool Weekly Kindergarten Planner

And I also have one without “letter of the week” for any homeschool age here: Homeschool Weekly Planner

Thanks for reading!

I’ve been asked a few times recently which approach we’ll be taking to homeschooling this fall, which curriculum we’ll be using, etc., The truth is that I really struggled for a few months not knowing exactly which route to go. I mentioned in a previous post that I was homeschooled myself and I’m also a teacher so I think most people just assume I have it together and have this amazing plan in place. But I don’t. Things have changed so much since I was a kid and there are sooo many different curriculums to choose from and different approaches to homeschooling. So I started to do some research. I watched a lot of you tube videos and read a lot of other blogs about what other homeschooling mama’s do. But to be honest, that kind of made things worse. The options were overwhelming and every time I felt I had made a decision, I would hear or see something else and change my mind. Having a type A personality doesn’t help either because I like to have everything organized and ready to go far in advance.

It was only as we began to dedicate some time to trying “school work” a few times a week (as a sort of test drive) that I have realized what will work best for our family as we dive into this new adventure. First off, my boys are SO different when it comes to learning. I love this about them. They are both very bright and like to learn but Bryson has a longer attention span and his fine motor skills are a lot more developed then Sky’s. He will sit down and color and won’t leave the table until every spot is complete, trying his very best to stay within the lines. Skyler will do some quick scribbles and be done with it. Bryson was writing his name on his own a while before Sky because he loved the challenge of being able to do it on his own. He would sit down and practice in his own time and would run up to me and show me his paper, so proud of what he had done. Skyler couldn’t be bothered until just recently, when he was good and ready. I was soon noticing that forcing Sky to sit down and practice printing or do a worksheet for more than 5 minutes was an extremely gruelling task. This kid has a wild imagination, and he is such a creative little soul but extended periods of seat work is not what he enjoys doing right now and it wasn’t fun for any of us. I was starting to get frustrated that the boys weren’t always interested in what I had planned out for them and I began to really question my decision to homeschool. But around that time, I remember reading about how at this age,  it’s important to focus on instilling a love for learning. I realized I wasn’t doing a good job of that. I was forcing the boys to do things they weren’t always ready to do and while it’s a good thing to push and challenge our kids,  I don’t feel I need to do a lot of it quite yet at this age.

SO. Things changed. I decided right there and then that I wasn’t going to order a set curriculum for kindergarten. I wasn’t going to follow a rigid schedule for the year with planned themes and activities the way the traditional teacher inside me wanted to. Instead, I was going to take an un-schooling approach. The definition of un-schooling for those of you who are a little confused is: an educational method and philosophy that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. In other words, I want the interests of my children to be a guide for what they learn about.

Studies have shown that children retain a lot more information when they actually enjoy what they are learning about and I started to see this myself since we’ve begun to implement this way of learning. So using a recent example, the kids have been really into “maps” lately. I noticed they were drawing a bunch of shapes and lines on paper, mixed with some letters and then they would roll up the paper and carry it around as their map.  Taking note of this interest, I told them that next week we would learn how to make a real map. I’ll teach them how to make a title, a legend, and a scale and we’ll probably start with just making a map of their room or the upstairs of our house. This may sound a little advanced for 3 year olds but they’re into it and excited to learn. And by making maps together, we’ll be tying in math, writing,  geography and art all into one project.

Using another real life example, the boys have just been introduced to chewing gum and one day one of them swallowed his by accident. They both started to cry worried that something bad would happen because they knew that swallowing their gum was forbidden! After calming them down, we came home to the computer and I found and printed off some diagrams of the digestive system and they learned about how it works. This made both the boys feel a whole lot better when they learned that the gum would slowly but surely make it’s way through. They colored in their diagrams and they can now tell you by pointing to each part how everything we chew and swallow travels through the digestive system from start to finish. Again, sounds a little complex for a 3 year old? My kids are not little geniuses by any means. I’ve simply been observing their interests and using them to determine what we’ll learn about next. It’s been working great. 

And don’t get me wrong, there is most definitely a time to practice printing our letters and numbers and all that important stuff, (I’ll make sure we get through the kindergarten expectations) but we’ll be taking a more relaxed approach. I give them a worksheet (we have a few workbooks from target and scholars choice and the amount of free printable’s online these days is amazing) or have them practice printing a letter a few times a week while I’m preparing their lunch. Or on this particular morning, we brought these fun new chalkboards from Chalkfull of Design  to a coffee shop and worked on number practice and shape recognition after they enjoyed a yummy treat. The boys LOVE these boards and I’m totally planning to order the letter and clock one as well! Learning can happen anywhere and you might just find us taking our books or printing practice to the beach or a park too. The flexibility of where and how we learn is probably the thing I love most about homeschooling.

So while we haven’t officially begun our school year, the focus of the year for us is going to be about instilling a love for learning. It’s kindergarten. We’re going to be doing a lot of play, a lot of free exploring, and our learning will be guided by their interests. I’ll jot down their interests as they come up and in future weeks, we’ll take out library books based around that topic, plan activities and field trips around it, etc.,   We also have a weekly nature group in place for the fall with a number of other homeschool families. We’re really excited about this as our kids already LOVE to be in nature and it provides so many opportunities for learning and free-exploring the world around them. A few weeks ago after a hike through the woods, we had seen a huge turtle in the water and the boys wanted to know the difference between a tortoise and a turtle so we came home and researched it together. Learning can be fun. And that’s what this first year of kindergarten is going to be all about.

Thanks so much for reading!