Our first week

I intended to write about our first week of homeschooling before starting our second, but we just moved out of our house and my weekend didn't have enough sanity in it to include blogging :)

Yes, we started school the week before moving house, and in the middle of the chaos of boxes and packing and lists and Goodwill trips, we had a great week! I am so excited that our journey into school at home started well.
I am also glad that the length of our school days has ranged (so far) between an hour and a half, and 45 minutes on our quickest day. It just feels so ... manageable! I know this time will increase as she gets older (if we're still homeschooling by then), but for this season that is a really good time frame.
We start our school day around 9, and pray before doing anything else. This is mostly for my own benefit since I am trying to manage a toddler while I help Anna with her school work, but hopefully is also instilling a good habit in her too! We start out with our Bible verses that we're working on memorising during the year, and then switch to her 'workbook' classes. She uses a book for math and handwriting, and since those require more of her concentration than the rest of her work, we start with those when she is fresh and eager to learn :) Levi usually sits with us at the table and colours on a piece of paper (Mark's idea on our first day, and it's become a fun habit that hopefully will last! Every single day Levi asks me to draw airplanes, helicopters and eyeballs for him to scribble on...). When she's finished with her math and handwriting exercises, we go sit on the couch and read her books together. We're reading the Mother Goose book of nursery rhymes, Uncle Wiggly's Story Book and Eric Carle's Animals Animals, and also the Berenstein Bears' Science book. We don't read all of them every day, except for her science book.
And then we're done! Oh, and we don't do school on Fridays :)

I am planning on adding in a phonics book next semester (we're not doing any specific work on reading right now, although she's picking up a lot outside of 'school time' anyway), and I have some books on music, art and world cultures that we'll incorporate during the year too.

I'm trying to include fun activities that supplement the ideas we're learning, especially in her science book. We started with seasons, which obviously she knows very well by now, but we're incorporating some new ideas too. Winter was the season we studied last week, so we compared cold water from the tap with ice water to learn about different degrees of 'coldness'. We also saw that even though cold tap water felt cold, it was still warmer than the ice so it made the ice melt - and then became much colder itself as the ice cubes became smaller.

So, we are having fun! I'm praying that it lasts, and that this is something good for our relationship. She is definitely a quality time girl, and I'm wondering whether the focused time we spend together might be one of the benefits of homeschooling. We'll see!