Our "School"

A note that has absolutely nothing to do with this post: Our blog has recently had more traffic than usual, do to some of the blogging groups I've joined, so in the interest of safety, I am no longer using our children's names on this blog......sorry if this is confusing for anyone. Also, for those of you who know my children, could you please avoid using their real names in the comments? Thanks, we appreciate this. We're not ready to take the blog private, but we do want to be more careful.

We have been considering homeschool for our kids for quite some time, (for several reasons that will take a whole different post for another time) so I thought that rather than wait until P Doodle is actually school age and panic because I don't know what I'm doing; I'd better get my feet wet, and see if this is something I can actually accomplish. Besides the fact that we never did plan on sending him to preschool, and we need more structure to our day! We started out a few weeks ago, and the kids absolutely love it. Not only is it something fun for us to do, Babycakes has suddenly discovered that he loves to "read" and both boys have found that they can actually sit still to listen to a lesson or work on a project; something I think their nursery teacher at church has really appreciated, (she actually asked Brandon if we had put P Doodle on some sort of medication. Sidenote: Their nursery teacher does not have children, and we have afternoon church which means no naps, and snacks instead of a good lunch....my children are not crazy in real life, they just look that way on Sunday). Here is a sample of our first week of "school".

For our first week, we learned about cows. The boys learned the vocabulary word, "calf", we focused on the letter A, the shape of a square, the number 1, the color green, and P Doodle even memorized "Hey Diddle Diddle". Do you like the cows they made using pre-cut squares? Babycakes obviously had more help, but I kind of like the artistic license that P Doodle used to make his! They turned out so cute we sent them to Poppy as a "get-well" card. Each week we focus on a new letter, shape or color, number, etc. It has been so fun to see how excited the boys are about it, and Babycake's vocabulary and eagerness to speak has skyrocketed since we began.
The outline we follow can be found at www.letteroftheweek.com. Everything is all there for you, including a suggested reading list, instructions for making the poster, and links to pictures and coloring pages. There are also suggested gross motor and fine motor skills activities for each week. There are a couple of different course levels, we obviously chose the first, the "preparatory curriculum". The whole program is phonics-based and geared towards learning to read, but it incorporates, numbers, shapes and can be added to, to incorporate whatever you want to learn about! It's super easy to use.
One more link for anyone with "pre-readers" out there, (or even early readers actually.....there are a few different levels). Check out www.starfall.com. It's a site with free phonics based games. P Doodle calls it his "letter games" and he loves it, (we click on ABC's and use those games) When he's bored, instead of asking for a movie, he usually asks for "letter games" and I am more than happy to comply! Babycakes loves to watch as he plays, and he has learned to recognize about as many letters as P Doodle.