Our First Week of Homeschool

We started off the month of August with our first official week in homeschooling.  I've gotta say that it was a little rocky, but we are at least off to a good start.  My goal is to make this blog a part of our homeschool portfolio, to help me keep track of what we've done, and to show others who may be interested what my boys are learning (and how they are learning it). 

So, I guess I will start off with giving a brief description of what our family is like and how we plan to do things (for this year, at least).  I have two boys: Hayden and Sawyer. 

Hayden will be 5 years old September 27th.  He loves math, and he LOVES science.  If we did nothing but science experiments all day, every day, he would be the happiest kid on earth.  Hayden does NOT like writing or reading at all.  However, he loves to be read to, and I am continually shocked by his ability to remember things he learns from having books read to him. 

Sawyer will be 3 years old September 12th.  He loves music in every form.  He was singing his ABCs before Hayden, and he attempts to sing songs along with me the first time he hears the song by watching my mouth and following along as best as possible.  His memory with songs is amazing.  He even sings along to "Defying Gravity" from the musical, Wicked, when it comes on the iPod in the car!  Unlike Hayden, Sawyer LOVES to read.  He can't yet, but he sure does try.  He remembers short books that are read to him a few times, and he will "read" them to himself or to Hayden (and Hayden loves to have Sawyer read to him).

So, with all that said, let me tell you a little bit about what we did for our first week of homeschool!

For our first week, I focused on teaching them about the Pledge of Allegiance and the American Flag.  They learned about the first flag vs. today's flag, what the stars and stripes stand for, how many there are, the colors of the flag, where to place your right hand, rules and etiquette of the flag, etc.  Hayden is working on putting together a lapbook of the United States flag.  I was hoping it would only take the first week, but I have learned that this is obviously not going to be the case! 

Each day we start off our school day by saying the pledge of allegiance.  After that, we go to the calendar and add another day, talk about the month, the days of the week, and the weather and season.  Then we focus on the nursery rhyme of the week.  The first week's nursery rhyme was "Mary Had A Little Lamb".  Each day we do something different with it (Find the letter of the week in the rhyme, clap to the syllables, listen for rhyming words, etc.).  Then we move on to a short rhythm instruments activity.  I'm using the book "101 Rhythm Instrument Activities for Young Children" and the boys love it.

Using the Pledge of Allegiance theme, we focused on the letter A this week in language arts.  Sawyer began putting together the first of his mini books, and Hayden traced the letter Aa's in the mini books he already put together last year.  We also used pretzel dough to form the letter A (and of course, eating it was the best part).  Other random things we did was play ABC Bingo and worked on matching lower case letters with their capital letters.

For math, we focused on the numbers 13 and 50, and came up with as many ways to add 2 numbers to get to the number 13 as we possibly could using toy cars as our visual aids.  Hayden became obsessed with one of my calculators and insisted on playing with it.  So, I let him use it to check our work.  We did AB, ABC, and AAB patterns with the colors red, white, and blue.  We also put together a venn diagram of America's first flag and the American flag today, talked about shapes (particularly the rectangle and triangle since those are the main shapes of flags), and we touched a little bit on the concept of symmetry.

So that's the main gist of our first week of school.  We did do a few art and music activities that I didn't post, but will post some in the future.  This is my first time ever creating a blog, and I'm hoping I will get better at it as I go along.  Thanks for reading, and happy schooling!