Getting Ready for School - Part 3

Today, I'm showing you how I plan on organizing my school journey. I would love to have a cool notebook full of sheets, calendars, to do lists, etc.. But I can never get that far, so I only have a few things to show you. I started out figuring out how much I need to do each subject and making a check off list for that. Here it is. Next I've made a schedule, this is a very rough draft. I'm not going to stick to a strict schedule, this will just give me direction. Some things don't need to be done everyday, such as the Animal Study or the Five in a Row, but I'll leave the option there, so that it does get done somedays :)

Next, I've taken five folders and marked them Monday through Friday. These folders will hold the worksheets that we'll be doing for the day. It will include Math, Writing, sometimes Spanish, and any other sheets needed for the day.  I also have three for anthony, I'll be putting color & shape worksheets in there along with coloring pages or any others worksheets I have for him.

I will then have the following weeks worksheets in these file folders. At the beginning of the week I'll have everything set, so I can pull out a folder and know what we are doing for the day.

I also have folders for each subject, so if I find a worksheet or something interesting in that subject, I can place it in the folder.

Here are our school boxes, and Alissa excited to start school  

And a few more things that arrived, the science kit looks way cute, I'll be buying another one of these for Anthony.

Getting Ready for School - Part 2

Bible - Bible is what I'm most excited about. We will be reading through this whole bible this year. We have to read 3 stories a week. I'll be making flash cards from one verse I picked to memorize for the entire week from the chapters we're covering. I'm hoping that when we start our day with this, Alissa will soar. We've been working on pray together as a family and she really enjoys that.

Math - I'm using the Math K5 book, we are doing 1 lesson a day. I chose this book, mainly because it is really cute, it has colorful pictures. We are not going to use any of the manipulative's or the teacher's guide, because I want to keep math simple. All of the concepts are easy enough that I can explain them to her or show her them in my own way.

Writing - I'm mainly using Spectrum Early Years, Learning Letters. We will be using this book on Mondays. I'll introduce the letter and then we will use other random books I have to reinforce the letter through out the week. This will take us 26 weeks, and then we'll work on forming words.

Reading - I'm using Teach Your child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I have a fondness for this book, because it's what I used to learn to read. Alissa seems to enjoy it also, it works for us and we're sticking to it. I'm also suplementing that with the Reading Eggs.com program. This is a very cute website that teaches kids to read. She really enjoys playing the games. We'll do 3 lessons of the 100 easy lesson book and 2 lessons from ReadingEggs.com a week.

Language Arts - We'll be doing 1 lesson from Language Lessons for Little ones a day and 4 stories a week from What your preschooler needs to know. I think she will love the preschooler needs to know book. She loves any stories or songs.

Science - We'll be doing a unit study on animals, leveraging this book. This is a very cute book, they have multiple topics you can choose from, but I chose animals. We'll do projects and read books about animals 3-5 days a week, just depends on how well it goes.

Five in a Row - We'll be using this just to add some fun to our schooling. We're doing a co-op with our homeschool group, so we will be doing 1 book every 2 weeks. We'll read the book every day and then discuss one topic from the book and then once a week we'll have a day to do projects based on the book, including science projects or craft projects, etc..

Foreign Language - We'll be using this book for spanish, Alissa is thrilled to learn spanish. We'll take a two years to get through this book. It looks a lot like a preschool book, but teaches the spanish words for colors, shapes, letters, etc. We'll also be watching Signing Time to learn some sign language.


Next I'll show you how I'm organizing everything and a schedule of how we're going to get through all this in a week. 

Getting Ready for School - Part 1

Look what arrived in the mail!!! It's time to prep for school, I've received boxes of stuff that I found on timberdoodle.com. I'm so excited to share with you what I'll be doing with Alissa this school year. 

 Here it all is out of the box, doesn't that look soo fun!

These are for Anthony. I'll be using them to keep him busy. We've already opened the lace-a-shape and Fanta Color Junior, and they work great. The kids both love them and Anthony especially loves the Fanta Color Junior. He completes the puzzles perfectly. 

The Colorback Sea-Turtle and PeekaBoo Animals puzzles are also to keep Anthony busy. The Camelot Jr. is for Alissa. You're given pictures and blocks, you have to build what you see in the picture. I'm looking forward to doing this one with her.

These are for Alissa. We have Bloco, these are like foam puzzles, Colorful Caterpillars, this is a game where you roll a dice and then lace a caterpillar. We'll be using the abc cookies to leverage our reading and writing. Crocodile Hop is an active game for the kids to play together.

Here we have Starter Spanish, for Alissa. She's super excited to learn spanish. What your preschooler needs to know is a book of stories, songs, rhymes, and some science and history too. Both of the kids will enjoy this along with the Wii Fit for kids.

Next, I'll show you the actual curriculum we'll be doing this year. This stuff is mostly just to supplement and help keep their hands and minds busy. 

I want to be like you :)

I'm feeling soo blessed with friendships lately! I've had many different seasons of loneliness and insecurities and that makes me so grateful to have so many opportunities in front of me. I'm so thankful for the ladies that have reached out to me and given me an opportunity to be their friends and given me time to open up with them. I know I'm not the most talkative or exciting person to be around, though I would love to be. To be honest, my goal is to be like Tess Benson, super sweet, inviting, accepting, inclusive, and fun to be around. I'm just learning that I need to be confident in who God made me and not worry so much about what other people think of me. As long as I am who God wants me to be, that is who I want to be. I know God is giving me these opportunities to be around His people and build relationships, now I need to be willing to open up. To grab hold of these opportunities and jump in head first :)  In order to do this, I need to give each social engagement over to the Lord. To ask for His strength and confidence in each situation. So, I'd like to say thank you to Julee, Kate, Nicole, Tess, Michelle, for inviting me into your circle of friends and for just being super sweet and loving to me :) I love all of you!!