The Rest of Our Homeschool Day

So...I forgot to finish the little series I was doing about our daily homeschool schedule.

Oops.

Anyway, here's how the rest of our homeschool day goes. After we do some reading, we do...everything else. That is, whatever other activities I have planned. The subject and format of the activities changes every day, based on what I have prepared and what I feel like doing.

(Because, y'know, this whole homeschool thing is all about me and what I feel like.)

Anyway. The "other" activities are sometimes games we play on the floor:



Here he's trying to pick up beads with a clothespin. I think we were pretending that the clothespins were bird beaks and the beads were birdseed.




Tracing used to be a regular part of the routine--he was obsessed, kinda--until about a week ago. He won't trace at all now. So we'll start that again when he feels like it.




Or we do an art project or a little science experiment at the table. That's a glittery snowman, with enormous snowflakes falling around it.

Most days, we do two of the above. When we're really lucky, we do all three. Sometimes we also do a little video or game from The Head of the Class. I'm planning on doing a later blog post on The Head of the Class, because it's been a pretty good supplement to the other stuff we're doing.

Unless I totally forget to post about it, like I did with this one.

Math? Pre-writing? Both?

Well, here's another one that didn't work out.

Little Boy was supposed to look at a number (we got these magnets at the dollar store, but they look like Melissa & Doug) and then "write" it with cotton balls.

He just couldn't quite do it. Next time, I think I'll print out big numbers, and he can lay the cotton balls right on top. Kinda like tracing.

Reading

So, after we do a bit of calendar and weather stuff, we move on to reading. If we have some Bob books handy from the library, we'll read one of those:

(I've blogged about Bob books before.)

And then we do a lesson out of The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. If we don't have Bob books around, then we just skip straight to this book.

Little Boy is flying through Ordinary Parent's Guide. He just caught on to reading really quickly, and he can't get enough of it ever since.

(I've blogged about The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading before, too.)

I want to point out right here that I don't really think of Little Boy as "advanced" just because he reads well. Every kid has strengths, and this is one of his. If you want to read about something he was not good at, go to my personal blog and search for "potty training." Heh.

Next up in our preschool day: everything else!

Weather and Calendar Time

So, after doing all the church-y stuff, we move on to calendar stuff. It only takes a couple minutes.

We chart the weather using this graph from Confessions of a Homeschooler (scroll down to "Calendar Time" and click on "Weather Graphing"). I like this because it's also a sneaky math activity. I think this is all the weather graphing we did in November. Remember how I said we don't do everything every day?

And then there's calendar time. We take a look at a regular calendar to see what the date is, and if it's a holiday or something, we talk about that. Once in awhile, we sing a little song about Days of the Week or Months of the Year, but Little Boy memorized those so quickly that I don't really bother anymore.

And then he switches our "perpetual calendar" to the right date. (I got it at Target last fall for...I dunno, maybe two dollars.) He insists on doing this by himself.

And that's it. I'd really like one of those pocket calendar thingies (like this one), but for now what we're doing works for us.

Next up: reading!

Our Changed Schedule

{Last May. A lot has changed since then.}

Some of my first posts on this blog were about what "Learning Time" looked like at our house.

That was almost a year ago. Looking back at those posts, I can hardly remember doing some of it--Little Boy has learned so much since then.

I think our preschool routine is more like a slow evolution than a sudden change--it changes so slowly that I hardly notice it.

So I thought I'd do a few posts on what our preschool time looks like now. I really don't do all of these things every day, but I try to do most of them. And on really, really good days, we get to all of it.

The very first thing we do is read a scripture and talk about a scripture story from this schedule that some kind lady posted on Sugardoodle. I don't follow it exactly. But we've kept up with the scripture of the month and we do a different scripture story each week, even if it's not the one on the schedule.

After that, I read a story out of the Friend. Most of the stories and activities are a bit too advanced for Little Boy, so I adapt them or skip over the ones for older kids.

Up next: calendar and weather!