Friday, January 11, 2013

A typical homeschool day this week

A few years ago I mentioned what a typical homeschool day was like in our home and I received a comment that we didn't really do all that in one day, did we? The commenter assumed that we did some subjects every other day or even weekly. The commenter was shocked when I answered that was all done in one day.
Then, just over a year ago we moved. Our homeschool schedule was completely interrupted with packing, moving, unpacking a few things for a few months while most of our belongings and most of our school supplies were still packed up, and then packing everything up and moving again a few months later before finally unpacking everything at our new house. We attempted through all that to keep a somewhat normal homeschool schedule. We tried to have school daily, but the only subject that was done daily was math, the rest of the subjects were done sometimes but not daily. It's not as bad as it sounds, it was not doing subjects like Latin daily. But it was not how I had planned to do homeschool.
After Christmas break I decided the Lambs had had far too long of a break from all subjects daily in homeschool. They were not at an education point that I had planned for them in these grades. They were also beginning to be naughty, especially not play well together-they had far too much free time. I spent a few hours last week doing some lesson planning to decide what direction I wanted the Lambs to finish out this school year-third grade for Lamb 1, first grade for Lamb 2.
I'm happy to report that our first week of all subjects in homeschool went fantastic! After teaching in the classroom, it is amazing to me what we can accomplish in homeschool in such a short time! On the days that Lamb 3 is in preschool, the other two can finish all subjects in just about an hour. That leaves the rest of the day to read independently, practice piano, and play-which recently means playing Snap Circuits (educational!) or Legos or watching Magic School Bus DVDS (they got the complete set for Christmas).
So here's what we did do in homeschool this week:
Recite Luther's Morning Prayer.
Work on memorizing a Bible Verse.
Read a Bible Story together (Abraham).
Practice singing a hymn (God's Own Child I Gladly Say It LSB 594).
Work on memorizing a poem from Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization.
Work on memorizing a part of the Catechism (creed and meaning).
Do Latin with the CD from Song School Latin.
Practice a Geography Song (identify South American countries on map).
Practice a math song from Math U See CD (adding plus 9 song).
Lamb 2 is working in Saxon Math 2, Lamb 1 is working in Saxon Math 3-they do at least two pages daily.
Lamb 2 is learning the phonograms in Writing Road to Reading and also reviewing how to print all his letters in Writing Road to Reading.
Lamb 1 is doing spelling in Writing Road to Reading and beginning to learn cursive.
Lamb 1 is reviewing music flash cards-all notes on the staff and also music terms.
Lamb 2 is reviewing his speech sounds he is currently working on (th and s).
Lamb 3 is doing a workbook on letter recognition and writing on the days he doesn't attend preschool.
In the evenings we read aloud together-currently books about Greece, amphibians, and fiction. Lamb 1 continues his goal to read every Boxcar Children book-he just finished #33. He occasionally adds a different book in his reading. He has The Hobbit in his pile now. Lamb 2 reads the BOB books.
There is a little more I would like to add in our schedule, especially art appreciation, but for our first week back I was very pleased with what we accomplished. Next week should go even better because we don't have to review, we can start right where we finished this week.


2 comments:

Melrose said...

I can't remember, but I think I may have been that commenter...of course that was when I had 4 kids under 6. I'm learning now to not compare myself to families with older kids :). it can seem so daunting to try and pump out a "real" homeschool day when I had a 5, 3, 1, and newborn. Now that schedule looks perfectly reasonable as we too are able to accomplish so much now that I have only one child in the 0-2 range, well not including the in-utero one ;). Looks like you had a great week!

The Mama said...

We are working on the same hymn!