We are off to a great home school year so far. It was rough the first week or so, but we are getting the hang of things and a good routine down. I love teaching my kids! It is a challenge at times, but it is so much fun. Reilly has a hunger to learn, Liam needs motivation and Natalie just wants to do it all herself.
We love Science and I am finding the kids are learning so much just by helping cooking, baking and just being in the kitchen. Liam misses his school friends and recess on the playground and his favorite teacher Mrs. Evans. Reilly loves being home, but yet wants to go to school. We will home school this year and re-evaluate next year. I guess the proof will be when we test them to see how they are doing.
Liam is now reading and well on his way to getting his new DS game if he keeps it up. He is also counting to 100, counting by 5's and 2's and we are moving on to learning addition and subtraction, fractions and more. He likes math more then I did at his age. Reilly is almost got all his letters and sounds down. He loves writing and copy work. He can write his entire alphabet and his numbers if I have it in front of him. He still has a hard time with a few letters. He is counting to 20 on his own. I am teaching both boys Science and History. We have learned about carbon dioxide (base + acid = gas). The boys love learning about magnets and how they can separate steel and aluminum. We have also learned about all kinds of animals. Reilly loves all the carnivores. The boys are into sharks and whales so we are studying those as well reading lots of books, watching movies and talking about them. We are on to the force of gravity this week. I would say that Science is by far their favorite even Natalie is into it. The History is a bit slow as it is a lot of reading, but they are enjoying learning about other places of the world.
Of course we do arts and crafts and have fun field trips. We have been to the Woodland Park Zoo to see animals and to the IMAX theater to see our favorite book on film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Next week we head to the Puyallup Fair.
We are off to a good start and I hope to keep the momentum going. I feel like it requires a lot of prep work and organization to stay on track, but that is my personality anyway. I am loving it even when I am dealing with sibling rivalry all day (most days). :O)
