Homeschooling with preschoolers

Hello, again! I can't believe how long it has been since I blogged. I will try to be better. Life has been such an adventure this last year! Now all of our boxes are unpacked and we are finally settled in our home. School has continued and we are nearly done with our first year's work. I am ordering our next year's materials next month so we should begin in April. We can hardly wait! I think I can definitely say that our homeschool experiment has been a total success. We are happy and healthy, our home is clean (shocking!) and our minds are full of a lot of new and wonderful things. I can't believe how much I have been learning, too! For instance, this week we read about Alexander the Great, Socrates, Aristotle and Archimedes (just to name a few.) I knew almost nothing about all of these men. It is so embarrassing to see the gaping holes in my own education. I can't explain how I feel as I see the excitement on little faces as they discuss the philosophers and ancient kings, or as they hear and recognize some great work of music or a literary phrase they remember from our studies. It's safe to say that I am jealous of my own children.

This week we have two of my sweet nieces here with us and they are joining in with school each day. I have always wondered how other mommies do it with little ones around. They had me up earlier than usual (remind me to kiss my older ones for learning to sleep in!) and their first question was, "what are we doing in school?" Actually, now that I think about it, I believe the first question was, "What's for breakfast?" but the second question was definitely about school. So, my crew pulled it together and started school at 7:45. We tried to keep up with the little ones and they had us hopping from one subject to the next. All our work was done by 10:30!

Here's how I did it:
We started our day all together reading the Bible and singing together. Then, we split up into two learning groups. The little ones (5, 4, and almost 3) all made up one study group while the older two (9 and 7) made up the other. I sent the youngers in to watch an episode of Word World on PBS and the olders sat with me to read our history together. Then, I sent the olders to work on their writing assignments for the day while the youngers came in for a phonics and writing lesson. (We reviewed the letters M and N.) After our fun lesson, they went in to watch The Letter Factory by LeapFrog with the assignment to watch for the letters M and N. The older two then worked on math lessons, LilliAnn on her own today and Grayson with me since he just graduated to a new math book. After that, I sent the older two to do their independent readings while I taught the younger group a math lesson. We used little toy barns and animals to practice counting, adding and grouping. Then, we sorted them for a while and finally I left them to play while I looked over the finished writing assignments for the editing lesson I'll teach next week to the older two.

This was all very fast paced for me, but the kids seemed to think it was business as usual. One thing I have noticed is that my kids don't make as much mess and get into as much trouble as they used to because having school at home keeps them busy and engaged with mom all day. They just don't have as much opportunity for mischief! Then, at the end of the day, we all can work together to clean up and the house stays clean. Why didn't I do this years ago? I guess God knew the timing would finally be right this time around. I'm so very glad that it is!