The Beginnings of Our Home Schooling Adventures

I intended to write a full post of how our home schooling evolving and progressing, but I am currently only about halfway through writing up a post and it is already two pages long. Instead of one post I have decided to divide it up into a two or three, so:

School with Edmund Part 1:

Edmund and I started doing “formal” schooling in October of last year. I say formal, because we always try to incorporate learning into everything we do; making a point of using the names of shapes and colors, referring to an item’s position by right or left, counting things, and singing the alphabet. But please understand, our lessons are not at all what you would probably find in a typical school. I started by mainly just making up each day’s lesson as I went along, without really any curriculum, any particular consistency in daily school, or even necessarily a flow from one day’s lesson to the next.

You may be thinking at this point that it can’t really be called school. What I was going for was getting into the school mode, both for Edmund, and myself, as well as trying to find what kind of learning system would work for us. Sure, I could have figured out all the curriculum details before we started, but then who knows when we would have started, and how much actual curriculum do you need for your preschool/kindergarten student anyway? Our curriculum is definitely still a work in progress, but I would like to share with you what I started with and how our schooling is going right now.

I did several Google searches for preschool resources and found a lot of free stuff online. Our first few months of school I did a lot with just printed worksheets and coloring pages that focused on whatever we were learning in a given day.

The first weeks was mainly “review” work with Edmund to figure out what he already knew. As I said before, we sang, counted, named colors, etc in daily play, so Edmund already had a good foundation in those areas. To begin, we did a lot of repetition of numbers and the alphabet, straightening out the ones that he had mixed up or was missing altogether.

Once he was fairly good with saying both his letters and numbers I made some flash cards, to work on recognition. I just used Microsoft Word and made a template then printed out two of each number or letter (for the letters I had both upper and lower case on the same card). We worked with the flash cards every day, as well as using them to play games of Memory.

By this time our lessons consisted of:

Ø Reading the Bible, I started with a regular Bible, abridging as necessary for his understanding, now we have a children’s Bible that we read. I ask him questions about the previous day’s reading, we read the current day’s reading, then talk about it.

Ø Singing a song, we have Edmund memorize songs (we started with Christmas ones). Once he has a song memorized we move on to a new one, but periodically we have him sing past songs to keep them fresh in his mind. He also likes to sing when he is playing, so all these songs go into him repertoire for that as well. (In fact you can tell when he really is starting to “get” a song, because he will start singing it throughout the day.)

Ø Numbers, first counting then moving on to recognition

Ø Letters, first singing the alphabet properly, then moving on to recognition

To be continued....