We have been homeschooling T for Kindergarten this year and I just wanted to document some of my thoughts and some of the things we are doing.
I honestly never thought home school would be something that we would do. It was great for other people, but not for us. Then, as kindergarten loomed ever nearer, we started to re evaluate things. Marc was ready to commit 100 percent, but I was a bit more reluctant. However, we both felt strongly that this was what we were supposed to do this year so, reluctant or not, I decided to dive in.
Teresa had a fantastic year in pre-K. She is pretty much the exact kind of kid that public school is made for. So while it did take most of the summer to convince her that home school would be just as good, she absolutely loves it now.
The first few months were rough. I would swing wildly from feeling like home school was the most awesome thing ever and 1000 times better than public school in every way to feeling like home school was the worst idea possible and that everything about public school would be better in every way. And that would be just in one day!
Now that we're half way-ish through the year I can pretty confidently say that we've found our groove. We've dropped some of our curriculum and added in some others and I'm really pleased with how she is doing. She struggles with some stuff, of course, but overall is doing great. As we've experimented with different things this year I've found that the programs we both like best tend to fall into the Classical Education category - things like Story of the World and First Language Lessons. It's awesome to see her absorbing so much from them. And actually being excited to sit down and do them most of the time!
I don't know that I can say I've gotten more patient through this year, but I have definitely gotten better at pretending, so I guess that's better than nothing.
Nora has been learning so much, too. Mostly she tries to do what Teresa is doing, as much as she can, or until she loses interest. She has a couple of little pre-K workbooks of her own, and she loves feeling like she has "school work" to do, too. She really wanted to work on learning to read (to be more like T, of course) but after a few very frustrating lessons we decided to put that off for a while.
Finn is often a cute little road block. He still usually takes two one-hour naps each day but there are SO many things that are easier to do while he's sleeping we don't always get to school work during those times.
Anyway, one of the things we work on with her language program is memorization. I was a bit skeptical, at first, at how simple they made it seem, but then T was able to memorize the first poem in no time flat. Nora even surprised me with being able to recite it as well. So, here are a few videos of some of the poems they have memorized thus far.
