Ready, Set....GO!

Once I started thinking about homeschooling I started thinking about schooling year round. Shh...don't tell my kids! They're excited about homeschooling, but I don't think they be thrilled about doing it all year...unless they don't know about it. And, I'm sneaky.

I quickly decided that our first few units would be based on things we're up to this summer. I wasn't sure when I wanted to start them, though. Part of me still thought I should wait until the fall. See, even I have a hard time breaking out of the "box" sometimes. Different scenarios kept swimming through my head, though, and I have finally decided to start sooner...like now.

Well, not right now...my pupils are in bed. But I will be doing things here and there to work our way into our new roles gradually. We're all excited, but we've never had a student/teacher relationship and I imagine that'll be a little awkward every now and then until we get the hang of it. Here's what I'm planning thus far...

Tonight we worked on number order with Gracie by putting our new Wildlife Explorer cards into the binders. Every month we get a bunch of cards to add to the ones we already have. They don't come in order. The binders are organized into eight groups and there are varying numbers of cards in each group. Tonight Jace found all the Group 1 cards and organized them and Gracie got interested. So, Jace and Gracie worked together to organize the Group 2 cards. I put in my two cents every so often (Jace was a bit bossy in his helpfulness) but they did pretty well together. During this little exercise they were dealing with three digit numbers, practicing team work, and Gracie learned the definition of digit...at least we told her what it meant. We'll see if it stuck tomorrow.

We're going to St. Augustine this weekend and have started learning a little about the city. (I learned a good lesson here. I should pre-read any books I plan on reading with the kids. Even though I found a book about St. Augustine's history in the juvenile fiction section of the library there was a rather detailed description of how a Spanish conquistador tied up and stabbed 200 French explorers. Nice, huh? Thankfully I saw it coming and summarized.)

We're going to do a slow study on horses before Memorial Day weekend, when we'll be visiting with my brother-in-law and his soon-to-be-wife, who have horses.

For Gracie's birthday we're going to incorporate a trip to a butterfly garden. A unit on Butterflies is being planned. I'll probably start some of it in New York while we're there this summer. It'll overlap a bit with our unit on National Monuments and Landmarks. We'll be visiting Washington DC and (hopefully) Mt. Rushmore during out move this summer. I have some reading, coloring, and other activities the kids can work on at hotels and in the van to learn about what we'll be seeing and get excited to see it! Both of these units we'll finish after settling into our new home in Washington.

I probably won't get into a solid, daily schooling routine until August. By then, though, we'll have had some time to see how we work together as a homeschooling family.

What do you think?