First Week of Homeschooling

Well last week was our first week of officially homeschooling the Mermaid.

By "officially" I mean by actually sitting down and following a curriculum.

The curriculum I am using is one that I found online, and it's one that is low cost, as all the materials I need is found either in the library or in my own home. I searched high and low for a curriculum that I would hope would capture the Mermaid's interest, and after the first week, I can tell that I've made a good choice.

Basically, I started the Mermaid in a preparatory curriculum for children from ages 2 - 4. It's a basic letter of the week curriculum. Each week, you have a theme for the week, a vocabulary word of the week, a shape or color of the week, a letter of the week, a number of the week, and a nursery rhyme of the week. You introduce one for each day. And you incorporate songs, books, and games into the theme of the week. You also have a learning poster that you keep where your child can see that reviews the items that you are studying that week. I would have taken a picture of the Mermaid's poster, but my camera is broken :o(. However, it is basically very similar to this one.

I am also keeping a book in which I will place in all the materials that we make during each week, so that the Mermaid can flip through it and review it any time. I also picked up a small notebook that I write in every day after we do learning time. I find this very useful for myself, because I am suffering from horrible "mommy brain" lately and need reminders of what we did, and it is also very useful for the Knight as well. He is very involved with the girls' schooling and now, when I am at work at nights, all he has to do is glance in the notebook to see what we are working on and he can work on it with the Mermaid more.

The preparatory curriculum basically involves themes that the Mermaid already knows (alphabet, numbers, etc.) but I figured that I would start her off on this one anyway instead of skipping to the preschool one. I figured I would do this because the Mermaid has soooo much energy and not much attention span and I wanted her to get used to a "learning routine" without me having to worry about if she really absorbing anything that we learn for the first couple weeks while she gets used to it. Then, by the time we get to the preschool curriculum, she will be used to a routine that involves actually sitting down for more than two minutes to learn something.

Those were my thoughts when I started. Here is what I learned:

I need not have worried. The Mermaid absolutely loves, loves, loves her learning time. She loves sitting down with me and reviewing her shapes and letters, loves the games we play to enforce them, loves getting personal attention. And believe me, this girl is thriving on all the individual attention that homeschooling is giving her, I honestly had no idea how easy she would be to homeschool. For example, this past week the letter of the week was "A" and the number was "1". Well, not only did she have a blast going through all the activities at home during our learning time, but now whenever we go to the grocery store or other place she loves pointing out all the "A's" that she sees and all the "1's" as well.

And I find that I like our learning time as well. It forces me to forget about the laundry, to forget about the dishes, to forget about everything except this angelic, adorable, three year old sitting in front of me, waiting to learn whatever I have to teach her. It gives me the chance to focus on her, I mean really to just focus on her. It gives me the chance to notice things about her that I've never noticed before, like how she holds her pencil and crayons perfectly with her tiny hands (how she picked that up, I don't know, it was never something I consciously taught her); or how she sticks her tongue out of the corner of her mouth when she is concentrating (I know where she got that from, I do the same thing); or the way her hair falls softly over her face when she leans over the paper to draw; or how her eyes literally do light up when something clicks in her head and she understands what we've been talking about. How in the world did I ever miss these things?

I've also learned that it really isn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. I was worried about how I was going to homeschool and take care of both girls and run my Doula business and run my Direct Marketing business. Plus cooking, laundry, housework, and working at my other job for two nights a week. Oh yeah, and being active in my local babywearing group and LLL. *deep breath*. But, again, I needn't have worried. Every day I go over the item of the day, we draw it or do other artwork to enforce it, then we play games to enforce it. We do the official "learning time" in less than an hour. The rest of the day, I take little opportunities to enforce the lesson outside of "learning time". Last week the theme of the week was Cows and the vocabulary word was "calf", so whenever we read books I would pick books with cows in it. Or when we were driving somewhere, we would sing songs about cows. Little things like that. And that is all she needs. By the end of the day, she fully understands the concept that we had been going over. So it works great for us. In fact, if anything, it's taught me to manage my time better, which I found is not as hard as I thought it was going to be. In fact, I am looking into joining a local Moms Group, mostly to meet new people.

I have also found a curriculum for children the Guppy's age. I think I am going to wait until after the holidays to start her on it, though, since it is a crazy time of year. In the meantime, she loves watching while the Mermaid learns, and I am sure that she is picking up on some of it.

So we have begun our journey. And I am so excited. Life doesn't get any better than this.

First Week of Homeschooling