Great Home Ed Websites

I wanted to share some web sites I have found helpful- stuff I have recently found as well as some tried and true favorites.

Learn In Freedom by Karl Bunday I really can't say enough about this site. Way back in the olden days when I was home schooling the first time around and I was first got online, I met Karl Bunday at a home ed site. He was a revolutionary thinker back then, and there is still a lot of golden nuggets all over his pages.

DonnaYoung.org Printables and Resources
So much stuff at this site!Everything from handwriting pages to print out to pictures of presidents to calendars and more.

Salsa
How to teach Spanish when you don't speak it yourself (Or have forgotten what you once knew)? Salsa is Georgia Public Broadcasting's award-winning Spanish language series for children.

Living Math
I want to build a bridge. I'd like to close the gap between math and history, science, literature and humanity created by the isolated way we traditionally approach math education.

Little House on the Prairie Pa's Fiddle Project
The goal of The Pa's Fiddle Project is simple but ambitious: to re-connect generations of readers with the rich musical legacy written into the Little House books.

First Week of School

We had a great  first week of school. I had planned things to go very slow, taking our time and starting at the most simple of simple things, but my girly had another idea. She wants to write and read so badly that she was making leaps ahead of where I had planned to start. Since I wouldn't want to frustrate her, I am changing to meet her where she is so we can catch that joy and excitement of learning! We are doing lots of things to help small motor strength and endurance. Play dough, Light Bright, and coloring all can help small motor development. Lil Princess was so proud of her rainbow alligator letter A. Lil Dumpling was more traditional with  a green alligator but also had a lot of fun. I got the Animal Alphabet from http://www.education.com/ Today we used plastic C clips to sort colors and make chains and learn about patterns. After that we used play dough to make letter A. I just use a plastic page protector on a piece of construction paper where I had written the letter A for them to press the play dough along the lines. They love it and it doesn't stick at all. Best of all? School only took about 30 minutes a day!

Nature Study

I'm so excited to start nature study! I got each of my little ones a magnifying glass, and put it in a bag with a couple simple field guides and a pair of oversize plastic tweezers. I left it in the basket by the door, so next time we go out to the park or even to take out the trash  I can just pick it up and we are all ready to learn and enjoy. I can't wait!

Living Math

I've heard about Living Books for years, but today I found a website that has me really excited!  Living Math is a website from a home educating Mom and has what looks like fabulous ideas about teaching math in real life, and about teaching "math history" reviews of math curricula and all sorts of goodies. Just passing along a little treasure. ;-)

Starting PreK

Last night I was chatting with an acquaintance and the subject of school came up. He asked "what will school look like?" for my 4.5 and 3.5 yos. Happily, I had an answer. I told him we would do some beginning handwriting and beginning reading as Lil Princess is very interested in those things. Lil dumpling not so much yet, but I suspect it won't be long. Lots of trips to the library for books books and more books, field trips, the zoo, the park, the museum and gardens and more books, of course.

 We will use Handwriting Without Tears for learning to print. What I love about this program is how it gives you so many tools for developing the small motor skills. Lil Princess struggles with small motor challenges, so we will have fun making letters from play dough, with a chalkboard, and coloring until she is ready. For beginning reading we will use a combination of basic phonics and sight words. Lil Princess is already trying to sound out words so I suspect she will take off quickly. We will read through the story Bible this year, and begin memorizing Bible verses. We will begin exposure to Spanish, with videos books from the library. Of course we continue speech and occupational therapy as needed- for now we have 3 appointments a week.

The most important things we will do this year is establish habits. Habits of obedience, doing you best job, not complaining, curiosity, and kindness will make all the years to come go much more smoothly!

School Update

My kiddos are little, so our learning is done very gently. To help pass the time when we are going to the many therapy and doctor appointments we have each week we sometimes view DVDs while driving. Recently we started using http://www.littlepim.com/ so drive time is now learning time! My kidlets are learning Spanish and I am refreshing mine, which had pretty much rusted out. This morning Lil Dumpling counted to 10 in Spanish! Not bad for a speech delayed 3yo who only gets to 5 in English. ;-) Lil Princess made it to 20.

My main focus has been on getting outdoors more. It hasn't been easy since it has been so hot, but we had a lovely picnic in the park last week. To try to help them start observing more I asked them to find a bug and was disappointed when neither was able to find one. I think next park trip I will be more prepared to help them find one and see what we can see.

Last night we went down to the harbor and the kidlets rode their trikes all over the place. Surprisingly there was minimal danger to other pedestrians and Lil Princess only crashed her trike once when she was looking at a dog and a railing jumped out at her. Lil Dumpling did amazingly well considering he wasn't able to pedal last week and this week I was having to chase to keep up with him.

We also went to the beach recently- everyone had a wonderful time and I hope to go back this week. I managed to get everyone sunscreened except myself, but the peeling is almost gone now so I am ready for the next try.









 For *my* educational work, I continued working on my Education Planner notebook, and researching our options for this year. I ordered the Handwriting Without Tears PreK program, joined a local home ed group, and wrote out a schedule to try to keep myself on track when we officially "start" school in September. Still working on the schedule as I was hoping to get a ladies Bible study in there one day, and a few other things. Not sure how to fit it yet, but will get there soon.

Another Fresh Start

So, I am going to attempt to start blogging about our various adventures with home education, home decorating, parenting (foster, adoption, bio, adult kids, special needs, etc.), trying to eat healthy and anything else that strikes me as worthy of being enshrined for time immemorial on the internet. We'll see how much fun we can have with it. ;-)

Lately the things on the top of our to do list have been fixing up our house and planning for school.

The house renovation started when we realized we needed to move everyone's bedrooms around because the little kids were getting too old to keep sharing rooms and has morphed into new floors, painting every room, new curtains, etc for the whole house. It needed it, trust me, but whew.... what a way to spend the summer! I'll be posting pics and updates on that soon.

School planning- another whew! I know from the last go-round that I feel much better if I have a rough road map for where I want to go educationally. It helps keep down the panic that can set in when there appears to be more chaos that constructive learning happening. Lil Princess is starting PreK this year, so of course I needed to plan at least the next 14 years. I recently found some things that make that easier than you'd think, so I will be sharing those soon too. ;-)

Thanks for visiting.