First Day of Homeschooling!

Yesterday was our first day of homeschooling! We are so excited to begin this journey with DS8, who I will refer to as Maverick, the Mavster, Mav, etc. It has taken a few years and trying different things in the brick & mortar school system to come to the conclusion that homeschooling is the best option for our sweet son. We also have a sweet daughter, DD6, who is truly enjoying her public school experience, and we support her in that! The school is able to meet her needs and keep her excited about learning, and we have decided that is the right path for her, until it needs to change. That's the good thing about living in a homeschooling friendly state; if things don't work, we can always change again if needed.

Yesterday, we had a short educational day because we attended the local annual "Not Back to School Pool Party." I was overwhelmed to see well over 100 kids at the party, and to realize that so many local families are homeschooling. Our local area homeschooling support group has around 2,000 members. To actually see so many children (happy, healthy, friendly, children) in one place really helped me know I am not at all alone!

For our curriculum this year, we are using Heart of Dakota's Preparing Hearts for His Glory. Each day has a well-laid out plan and is easy to follow along, and interesting for our son. We got about half of a day's work done yesterday before the party, and I saw some sincere interest in how the Bible connects to history which in turn connects to his life.

The party was a lot of fun - he made fast friends with another boy his age who enjoys some of the same activities, and really had a great time. He also went off a diving board for the first time ever! No fear at all, just went up to the end and jumped right off! Brave kid! :)


Today was our second day, and we have no plans out of the house until soccer this evening, so we could focus and get back on track.

We start out with a good breakfast followed by caring for the animals (dogs, horses, chickens). Today we even spent an hour out at the barn and riding a horse!

Each day we do some Brain Gym exercises to get us ready to learn, and also to help strengthen our eyes and their ability to work together.

Our first activity today included learning to draw a plant with step by step direction, and I was impressed with the detail and patience our son showed. He was able to work on it until he was really done - and I thought of how he might be rushed or forced to use color vs. pencil in regular school.

Mav is enjoying listening to stories on the couch and the ability to stretch out when he needs to. He is very good at listening no matter his position, and I'm working on improving eye contact when I ask him questions. One of our activities was to read a Psalm from the Bible, and we saw how it was different between versions - and even different Bibles that were all considered NIV. I also have a digital version which settled which one was the most up to date, but we had some discussion about how the Bible has been translated so many times.

We got through our language arts lessons and found that it took a little more processing time to figure out the alphabetical order of 5 words than I expected, but it improved with each exercise - he had to figure out his own method.

The most surprising thing about today was when I asked him to copy one sentence in cursive. He had been practicing cursive all last year in 3rd grade on worksheets I had seen (no formal writing paragraphs yet). As he began, I was astonished to find that for some reason, he had not been taught the proper formation of many of his letters. When he was done with the letter, it looked mostly right, but how he got it that way was labored and not the correct method at all. When we talked about it and he realized he had been doing it wrong for a whole year and no one had corrected him or watched him in detail before, he broke down into tears. He was so frustrated; cursive had been so hard for him all year and he had worked so hard to do what was asked of him. We talked about how if it is learned correctly that it is actually much easier on your hands than printing, that we need to sign our names and checks, and to be able to read cursive. We agreed on 5 min a day or one worksheet, whichever ends first. :)

I am so glad we made the decision to homeschool!