I'm Back!

Yay! I miss blogging so much and thought I'd give it another try.

Olivia just started her kindergarten year, which is technically our second year homeschooling, but I'm hoping the blog can be a way for me to track what we do. I'm totally enjoying homeschool! She is liking it much more than last year, since I found a new curriculum and have calmed way the heck down about progressing at a certain pace.

For kindergarten, we're using a program called Moving Beyond the Page as our main curriculum, along with a bunch of items I bought from a company called Timberdoodle. I went WAY overboard this past year buying up tons of curriculum and I fully admit that I became addicted. Between MBTP, Timberdoodle, Usborne Books (my sister is a consultant), the Lakeshore outlet in town, and a website called Rainbow Resources, I spent a full two grand on homeschool curriculum, books, and supplies this year, and that's because literally everything I bought was on sale or reduced price. Holy! Yes, I bought too much, BUT, considering that it will carry us through kindergarten *and* first grade, it's kind of a heck of a deal compared to what we'd pay in school tuition elsewhere. That's how I'll continue to justify it to myself, anyway :)

Moving Beyond the Page is a literature-based program, meaning we read books about a certain topic or theme together, and then do activities from the student workbook. There's a teacher's guide to help me, so we can just open and go each morning, with minimal prep. We started the year talking about environments and habitats for people and animals. We just ended a unit about weather, and next week we'll be working on the seasons.  We do school five days a week, starting in the morning when her brain is fresh, taking breaks throughout the day. In total, we probably spend anywhere from one to three hours a day on schoolwork. If she finishes the MBTP assignments, then she gets to choose another activity. I wrote out the names of all the books and art kits and phonics readers and textbooks and STEM games and manipulatives and such that I've been accumulating and cut each one into a little paper strip that I added to small bags labeled Math, Reading, Writing, History/Geography, Science, and Art/Music. Each bag was assigned a number of 1-6 and she gets to roll a special die she bought at the homeschool conference to figure out which bag she'll pick from. The deal is that she must do whatever activity she pulls out, with the understanding that some of them will be super fun and some of them will be book work. She's been cool with it and I think the process makes her feel more in control of what she gets to do. We haven't repeated anything yet, so it's still all very exciting to roll the die and pick from the bags.

Alexandra is 8 months old and crawling all over the place. She's pulling herself up to standing and trying to walk already. Her first word/ sound was "na na" and she babbles all day long. She signs "more" to mean she's hungry and ready for food. Her sister remains her favorite person in the whole world, followed by mama and dada. We love her so much!