AWANA Games

We are all very excited at our house about AWANA Games today. In case you didn't know, the AWANA Games is a competition where teams from AWANA churches in an area compete against other AWANA teams in AWANA sanctioned games. Cameron has gone to two practices at our church, and they practice some of the games at each AWANA club night, so he's ready! I've got my camera, now I must remember to take it. Go Church of the Foothills!

March 2010 Update

I haven't written in a while so I thought I should say something. Let's see, I am trying to get a jump start on the next school year and figure out what we will be learning. I asked Cameron and he said he wanted to learn about birds, specifically about how they gather food and feed their young, and how they poop (my boys very much love to talk about poop). So I am now in the process of putting together a unit study on birds. I put a whole bunch of books on hold at the library, and when they come in I guess I'll just take a look at them and hopefully will get some ideas on activities we can do to go along with the reading on birds.

I am loving the language arts program we are using, Spell To Write And Read. I modified it a little to fit our specific needs and Cameron's age, but it has worked so well for us. Cameron has now done 210 spelling words, and he is so very proud of himself. We will continue on with this program next school year, but will also start the Cursive First program so he can learn to write in cursive. I think we might also put more emphasis on sentence structure and writing creatively.

Still trying to figure out what to do for social science. Maybe a unit on California History, or the Railroads, or Pioneer Days, or World Capitols? Oh well, I still have plenty of time to figure it out. We'll probably do science kits for science this year. Cameron loves to do anything that even remotely seems like a science experiment.

Well, we're still trucking on in this homeschooling thing. We've kind of figured out a schedule that works for us, but I also realize that I need to be flexible and willing to change if necessary. It's such a wonderful adventure!

Beginning Of The Year Update

Well, where should I begin? We had a nice break at Christmas but are now back into the swing of things. For science, we ended our unit on the human body and are now working with a textbook to finish out the kindergarten standards. The focus is on the earth and it's natural resources. Pretty interesting, but I will definitely need to make it a little more exciting for Cameron by adding activities to reinforce what is being taught in the book.

Cameron started Gymnastics again at Tumble Time and he is loving it! I wanted to get him into doing some kind of scheduled physical activity and, since he has no interest in sports at the moment, I thought gymnastics would be good. And it has turned out to be great for him. And the best part is that Horizon is paying for it. The students are allowed to use a portion of their yearly allotment on PE, so we chose gymnastics.

We are still continuing in the same math and language arts curriculum that we have been using all school year. I am constantly amazed at how well Cameron can read. And he loves to do it, too. Sometimes he reads to Sammy and it just melts my heart. We are thinking about signing him up for the Paws For Reading program at the Cameron Park Library. Every Tuesday at 4:00 he would go to the library and read to the dogs (they are all guide dogs in training). He really wants to do it, but he also has AWANA on Tuesday nights so we need to decide if we want him to have 2 activities back-to-back like that.

This might sound nuts, but I am already planning some topics to study for the next school year. I figure I should start now so I have plenty of time to prepare. We are thinking about a study on the railroad systems with a focus on the early U.S. railroads. I got this idea the last time we were at the Train Museum in Sacramento. Cameron seemed to be receptive to it, so we'll see.

I still need to work on being disciplined with his school work. Luckily, I have time because he is only in Kindergarten and the amount of work he needs to do is so little that we can get it done in about 1 hour total per day. I'm just not that good at making sure we do it every day. Some days we will do a lot of work and then we might skip the next day or two. That might be a good New Year's resolution: stick to my schedule and do school work every weekday. OK, I am committing to it. let's just see if I stick to it.

Feeling The Blah's

I am finding that is so easy to lose our focus with homeschooling. These past few weeks have been so crazy that we haven't done much "official" school work at all. If I don't make a concerted effort to stick to our schedule, then it all goes haywire. The only consolation I have is that Cameron is ahead in his reading and math, so it's really not that bad if we veer a little off course. Every so often, though, I need to re-center and get motivated again.
On a side note, Sammy is very much into doing his own "school book" as he calls it. His "school book" is actually a preschool critical thinking curriculum that I also used with Cameron 2 years ago. Cameron totally loved and now Sammy is, too. This curriculum comes with a workbook that contains matching games, mazes, patterning, letter writing and geoboard patterns along with a geoboard for copying the patterns in the book or creating your own patterns. He also has a few other workbooks that he likes to do while I am doing school work with Cameron. I think Sammy must feel like he should do school work just like Cameron. It's way too cute.

Websites I Love and Recommend

I thought I would put together a list of websites that I would recommend to people (some apply to homeschoolers, others apply to anyone with kids). Some of them I use regularly, but others I have not had the chance to benefit from yet. Those sites I have listed because they look like they will be very useful to me someday and so I thought I would include them as they might be useful to some of you. So here they are:

www.familyzip.com - assortment of tips about anything and everything related to kids and families.

www.thehomeschoolmom.com - free newsletters offer tips, encouragement and sites of the week for homeschooling families.

www.kaboose.com - site full of great craft and game ideas, as well as parenting tips and recipe ideas.

www.learnhowtomakeit.com - learn how to make just about anything, from arts/crafts to websites, and everything in-between.

www.pbskids.org - fun and educational games for kids.

www.starfall.com - kids learn to read while having fun.

www.funbrain.com - all kinds of fun learning games

www.eclectichomeschooling.org - great site for homeschoolers full of articles, resources, tips, etc.

www.lessonplanspage.com - 1000's of free lesson plans.

I hope you find these sites to be useful and relevant to you!

Homeschool Unit Studies

I just finished reading a great book about unit studies that has really got me excited about the prospect of using unit studies in our homeschool program. The book is titled "Everything You Need To Know About Homeschool Unit Studies" and I got it at the library. The book was great because it explained how to go about creating your own unit studies and even gave suggestions for many different topics that can be studied.

I'd heard a little about unit studies already, but this book really gave me the confidence to make the decision to use them for most of the school subjects. I will still need to use a set curriculum for language arts and math, but I can incoporate all other subjects (like history, science, art, music, social science, geography) into any unit study I do.

The whole idea of a unit study is to learn about a topic comprehensively, but in a fun and interesting way. So, instead of just reading a textbook about, say, the civil war and trying to memorize dates and facts, you could read period literature and do activities that really help bring to life what you are learning and cement it in your mind.

We are currently doing a unit study on the human body. Most of it I created myself by just looking online for ideas. We started with the 5 senses. My great friend and fellow homeschooler, Malinda, gave me two books on the senses and we used these for our read aloud time and then I found some ideas online for activities and crafts that help reinforce what we learned in the books about each sense. We are now moving on to the rest of the body and for this I have a Magic School Bus Journey Into The Human Body Science Kit. This set has 10 experiments related to the body that we will do and then we can write our findings in the included journal. Cameron loves doing anything that seems like an "experiment" so he has been having lots of fun with this unit study. And I love knowing that he will remember most of what he learns because it was interesting and relevant to him.

My problem now is trying to decide what unit study to do next. I get so excited when I think about all the fun things we will be learning that I just want to do it all right now! Oh well, I guess I'll just have to take it one step (or unit study) at a time. I am thinking about a study of winter animals. Any thoughts?

Why Do I Homeschool?

Ask any homeschooler and they will all probably give you a myriad of reasons why they homeschool. But most (or all) have only 1 or 2 main reasons, and consider all the others just great benefits. So it is with me.

I never knew what homeschooling was until I met a few families at my old church that homeschooled their kids. I had only ever heard about Independent Study, and that from high school, where the only kids who did that were the ones that seemed to not have been able to handle school for various reasons. So, of course, my first thought was that these "homeschooled" familes I met must have weird, socially stunted children. What I found was pleasantly surprising. These families had children that were (are you ready for this?) normal. So this sparked my interest and began my pretty intense study of homeschooling. I checked the internet, read books, went to a homeschool fair, and then decided that I liked all that homeschooling had to offer.

I guess one of my first reasons for homeschooling came about because I lived in the Bay Area where the schools are not that great, unless you live in an affluent neighborhood and I knew that we would never be owning a million-dollar home. So the thought that I could give my children a superior education (or at the very least, an education comparable to the public schools) was very appealing to me.

A few years later, as I have come to be in a much deeper relationship with God, my main reason for homeschooling now is to help my children view life and all things learned from a biblical perspective. God created everything and has given us the tools we need to help us understand how He did it. It is utterly amazing to me. So I want my children to see God and His workings in all subjects.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that families can't do this if their children are in public schools. I know many great God-fearing families who have done a wonderful job imparting a biblical worldview to their public schooled children. I am just saying that I know myself, and I know that if my children were in school it would be way too easy for me to be lazy about their education and leave it all to the school and not get involved. So homeschooling kind of forces me to do what God calls all parents to do.

I should also tell you that all the other benefits of homeschooling really appeal to me. Like the flexibility of being able to do school when we want and take vacations when we want. I also like being able to choose the curriculum we use. One of the greatest rewards, however, is seeing the excitement in Cameron when he learns something new and I feel blessed to be an integral part of that. I look forward to many years of watching my children learn, and also learning right along with them.