~The Homeschooling part of my life~

So as far as homeschooling, this is my first year. I never thought in a million years I would be a homeschooling mom. It has its ups and downs, but for the most part I love it!! Heath really loves the freedom of it but misses the interaction with his old school friends and I think he really misses the structure of a classroom type setting. That is one thing that I have found very difficult because I do have a 2 and 3 year old running around the house as well. Trying to keep them focused so he can work is not as easy as it seems. A friend from church Michelle let me borrow a book called, Preschool Activities in a Bag, and we have been working on putting together activities for the boys.

This is one of the activities we made for Eli. It teaches number recognition and number order. When he is playing with this activity I ask him the number before he matches it up with the number trail. He knows his numbers up to 12 but past that we are still learning. We have lots of activities made and I will post pictures of other activities in a later blog. Currently this is his favorite!
As far as Heath, we use the A Beka curriculum and I love it. Now, with that said there may be a "better" curriculum but this is all I have used and so I have nothing to compare to, I have looked at others but nothing about the others really jumped out at me. I have heard though that the Saxon math is great. Heath was in a private school for K3 and K4 and I wanted to use the same curriculum they used because we may send him back to that school next year. We are using this year as a test...We will make a final decision this summer.
Heath has learned counting to 100 by 10's, he has learned his coins and the value of each coin, and what coins he would need to put together to buy "items". He has learned single number addition, and subtraction although I have not taught him subtraction...lol He just picked it up. I guess when you use M&M's occasionally to help with addition you learn subtraction by "accident". oops! lol He has also started learning to tell time. He has a hard time with writing his numbers occasionally, he tries to write his 4 backwards occasionally and he often forgets all together how to write some numbers so we do a little extra practice every other day with writing our numbers.
In handwriting he has learned how to write all lower case letters in cursive and has now started with the capital letters. He does really well with this on the days that he has decided not to be lazy!!! He has just recently learned the two vowel rule, short and long sound vowels and some of his "special sounds". He thinks he is a scholar now because he can read. lol He tries to read EVERYTHING and is getting a little ahead of himself. He is doing great and I couldn't ask for a more eager learner than Heath.
We also do bible study, He has learned about Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark, Jonah, Daniel and then we occasionally just read. I try to find out what he is learning about in Sunday School and we try to review that. This week we are learning about Abraham & Isaac without scaring him to death...lol
We do some Social Studies and art projects which he loves!! We have just this past week learned about George Washington...and just a side note, one great thing about homeschooling is when Heath wanted to see what the Washington Monument looked like we went right into my bedroom and found it on the Internet. Can't wait to get started on some of the Science stuff once it starts warming up. (Outside Time)
Anyhow, that pretty much brings us up to date on what he has learned and will be learning this week. Although that doesn't do it justice, he has learned so much more than just the few topics I have hit on in this blog.
~And again, I will put my trust in him. And again, Behold I and the children which God hath given me.~ Hebrew 2:13
~And Israel beheld Joseph's sons, and said, Who are these? And Joseph said unto his father, They are my sons, whom God hath given me in this place. And he said, Bring them, I pray thee, unto me, and I will bless them.~ Genesis 48:8-9