Trish’s Blog

It’s our second year of homeschooling and the picture above is from our second day. The boys are getting a spelling test and Zoe is just happy to have her own pencil, paper and clipboard. Sarah is at band, so we have an hour to do a bit of spelling and then play at the park for some exercise. I’m finding that this fits our schedule nicely since Sarah is not doing Sequential Spelling with the boys, so she’s not missing a lesson. The park nearby the school keeps me from having to go all the way back home. It’s a nice way to get out of the house, get the baby tired, and burn some calories.

Not only are we hitting the park daily, we are taking walks in the morning. I’ve downloaded a pedometer to my phone to keep track of our progress. The first day, we walked for twenty minutes and almost a mile. The second day, we walked for a mile and it took twenty-two minutes. We’ll build up slowly as the weeks progress. Seth wants to get up to 3 miles and Zack is shooting for 5 miles. (I haven’t asked Sarah for her goal yet.) We’ll see how it goes. I don’t want to walk all day. We’ll have to cut it to 45 minutes, tops. I’ve found the perfect place to walk, but we have to jump in the car to get there. It’s worth it if we can walk in perpetual shade and keep out of the way of cars. We’re walking on a bridge. We have a friend who lives near there who has extended an open invitation for a glass of ice water after our walks. This does wonders for my motivation!

There’s more new stuff we’re doing this year that we didn’t do last year. Like writing to pen pals, a drawing class using the book, Drawing With Children, copy work, and notebooking. Seth is learning cursive. I’m still getting situated–the whole year isn’t planned out yet. I needed to see how our schedule would pan out with two kids in middle school part time for electives. I was grateful for the week and a half when public school started before homeschool to get a better handle on how to map out the day. Things are just falling into place as I tackle them.

Even Zoe has started formal reading lessons using the book, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I had not planned on starting her in formal lessons, but she seemed to wake up to books this past summer. She never wanted me to read books to her before, so I’m jumping on it. We are skipping the writing tasks given with each lesson because she’s not ready to write, but she does the sounds well so far. She pretty much knows her alphabet in sign language and we sign them together while singing the Alphabet Song, so we’ll see how this translates into reading. If she’s anything like her older sister, she’ll be reading by this time next year.

I’ll try to keep the blog updated as the year progresses, but I still have a day job and I’m trying to up my hours so that means less blog time. I’ll find a way. I could just give up sleep. That would work.

Posted on September 5th, 2010 by trish
Filed under: Haley Kids, Homeschool