Homeschooling Adventure Begins - 9/13/10

So, here we go.

Our Weekly Topic is about starting school and making friends. This may seem a poor choice considering this is a homeschooling blog, but I think it makes sense for us. Noah will be starting his once-a-week preschool this week, and I want to help ease the transition. I'm sure this same topic could work for moms who wanted to put their children in some kind of sports or music program in the same way.

Our Composer of the month is Camille Saint-Saëns of Carnival of the Animals fame. We have been listening to this great piece in the mornings. I also just got a couple of books by the same name that I hope will be intriguing and start some conversations about the music.

Our Artist of the month may not begin until October. I'm not a very creative person, so this is going to be a bit of a struggle for me. I'm also trying to figure out how I can make the Charlotte Mason approach to art study work for us in a preschool setting.

Our Bible verse of the month is Philippians 4:13 - "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." We've already been working on this a bit, and he's getting really close to being able to recite it. I'm trying now to decide whether or not it is important to have him memorize the reference as well. I'm thinking that it's not important right now, but maybe when he's older we will make that part of our routine. I'd love to hear people's thoughts on the matter!

I found a couple of great websites that have coloring pages with the verses on them. Check them out here and here! Now, if only my son liked to color! We'll keep trying....

And now, without further ado... here is how our days will hopefully go this week.

Every day we will listen to Carnival of the Animals, read our books, review the alphabet by song or using Noah's alphabet train puzzle, and count to 20.

Monday is our weekly outing day. We are going to go to the library to pick up the books that we want to read on friendships and beginning school. Here are some of the books we are going to get:

• Berenstain Bears Go To School by Stan and Jan Berenstain
• Little School by Beth Norling
• Clifford's First School Day by Norman Bridwell
• Dinosaur Starts School by Pamela Duncen Edwards
• Ready, Set, Preschool by Anna Jane Hays
• Spot Goes to School by Eric Hill
• Making Friends by Fred Rogers

A great resource for finding children's booklists can be found here. I clicked on the "Books About Starting School" link, and found some wonderful ideas for our personal reading list.

On Tuesday, we are going to make a trip to the store. The preschool requires having an emergency kit, and we need to get supplies for it. Then, in the afternoon, we will assemble the kit while talking about what each thing is for and why we may (but hopefully not) need it. We may even make another one for our home and car so that we are prepared in case of an emergency.

Wednesday will be our day to stay home, read some good books, and hopefully spend a lot of time outdoors. I want to get a field guide for our region so we can start identifying plants, animals, and birds better than "That's a tree" or "That's a bug". I'm sure there are a lot of things we can learn about just in our backyard.

Thursday is the first day of preschool. His preschool is only 2 1/2 hours. I'm sure that we will talk about all of his new friends and experiences afterward.

Friday will hopefully be another quiet day. It's supposed to be raining, so maybe we'll try to do a rain-walk and find lots of worms!

I think this is doable. It will be a full week, but I'm hoping not to do more than 15-20 minutes of actual "schooling" with my son a day. More than that would just be too much for a 2 1/2 year old. The rest of the time will just be absorption of the world around him, allowing him the time to explore on his own. I need to make sure that we just make our home and environment a place where he can do this.

I'll catch up with you on Saturday to let you know how our first week went!