Homeschool Week One

We decided to start homeschooling Owen last Monday. We are on a four day a week plan that way we can participate in park dates and field trips with other homeschooling groups / families. We are using a Christian Curriculum called Sonlight, it includes: language arts, Core B (bible, history and geography), math and science. I add cooking, art and music to the program on rotating days. Our first week went pretty well, I was nervous about so many things; how Owen would respond to me as his teacher, would we be able to include Emma in a way that she felt a part of it but not distracting to Owen, things like that. The first morning we did all of our lessons outside on the picnic table, but the rest of the week was way too hot for that so we managed to mix it up a bit by reading on the floor in the living room, or lying on sleeping bags. This particular program uses literature books instead of textbooks and was one of the main reasons that we chose it. We have multiple books that we are studying at one time. We are reading Charlottes Web (we actually read that already last year,) a book about Missionaries who travel around the world and their stories, book of poems, and may more. I believe it’s a great way to learn and the curriculum has a lot of fun activities. It is a lot of reading and that is something I want to break up so that we can incorporate more hands on activities while I read to Owen.  I usually let him paint, draw or something while he is listening to the lessons. The math program that we chose has a lot of hand on manipulative and that helps. Of course Owens favorite is science. There is a science experiment every week at the end of the week. Last week our experiment was about magnetics and Owen walked around with a magnet for a few days trying to find anything to stick to it. So far so good, please keep praying for us.

We read, "If you give a Moose a Muffin," and we made mud muffins. 

Kids had fun making them but they said they didn't taste very good. They added everything to them, felt like a brick! I didn't want to try them! 

Owen's butterfly 

Working on building towers in math.

We also made sock puppets to go along with , "i
If you give a Moose a muffin." 

Emma wanted a lot of hair on her sock puppet 

The materials for sock puppets 

Owen's sock puppets 

Owen working on language arts
He loves to dictate stories
I will put one of them on the next blog

We were trying out some oil pastels 

Owen made this for daddy, I think we are all hoping for a quick winter around here!