Kindergarten: Completed!

First year of school completed!

We do school year round cause the weather sucks in the summer anyways and it means I can be very flexible with days off.  Also, school adds some nice structure to our days.  So in August we will start 1st grade using a Charlotte Mason curriculum called A Gentle Feast, which I am very excited about.

This past year I just put together my own kindergarten plan.

One of my main goals when we started school last August was to help Alice transition from picture books to chapter books as a read aloud.  Looking at the stack of books we read this last year, I'd say it was a success!

A special thank you to the Heartwood Hotel series for making her fall in love with chapter books.

This is not to say we stopped reading picture books.  Just ask our librarian.  Sooo many picture books.

 Another big goal was to, at her pace, teach her to read.  At the beginning of the year she was still struggling with remembering all her letter sounds.  We went through the 3 Explore the Code books and books 1 and 2 of Explode the Code phonics workbooks.  She is still a very beginning reader, like BOB book level, but that is some huge progress for her.

She also completed the Math-U-See Primer book.

We also spent a lot of time in nature and learning about nature using the Exploring Nature with Children (ENWC) curriculum.  Not as much time doing art as I had initially planned.  Also our study of the States dropped off by January.  But that is the nice thing about homeschooling, if something isn't working, you don't have to keep doing it.

This is what our schedule looked like.  Individual Time was about an hour during Jane and Rutherford's nap time/quiet time.  Tea time at 3 after naps and usually lasted 30 minutes.  After that they usually played in the backyard while I cleaned up and got dinner ready.  Family worship was in the evening (lasting about 15-20 min) before reading bedtime books.

Something that has worked really well for us has been doing daily tea time.  This is our tea time tray:

At 3:00 when everyone gets up from their nap/quiet time, we sit at the table and have juice/hot chocolate and snack.  I tried tea but they didn't like it.  Snack was a wide variety of things, yogurt, apple slices with cinnamon, something Alice and I baked like cookies, popcorn, goldfish, you get the idea :)  The kids love doing the candles, it makes it feel special and they like blowing them out at the end.  You can see what I read to them during tea time on the schedule.  For the poems I went through books like A Child's Garden of Verse, A Child's Book of Poems and Where the Sidewalk Ends.  We also went through the Children's Book of Virtues during tea time.  For read alouds we did books with very short chapters like the Roald Dahl books.

None of the kids think of tea time as "school" and all really look forward to it.  They often complain on the weekend about not doing it.  :)

So now onto 1st grade!

Jane Turns 4!

Jane, my poor middle child, so sorry this is 6 months late.

1 Year Old:

 2 Years Old:

3 Years Old:

4 Years Old:

Jane is 39 inches tall and weighs 32 lbs.

Her favorite show is Octonauts.

Her favorite movie is Wall-E.

Her favorite food is Mac and Cheese.

Her favorite books are Fancy Nancy, classics like The 3 Bears or Red Ridding Hood, and the Dr Suess books.

She loves unicorns.

She has become a lot more talkative this past year.  She is more introverted, strong willed and independent than Alice.  She can be pretty content playing by herself in her own little world.  

She plays really well with Rutherford.  She loves Alice and they play together constantly but they can also bicker quite a bit.  She has no interest in Arthur.  She not negative about him, just not interested in him.

Jane's my little monkey and can often be found fearlessly climbing something.  She also seems to be more accident prone but also very tough so I often find cuts, scrapes and bruises on her that I have no idea how she got.