Homeschooling has become my pride and joy recently. I have loved having themes each week to guide our learning...however I may have taken it a bit too far. Reality check, Will is not yet 4...and he's a boy which means he's just not ready to sit and write for 15 minutes like Ruth. Ha, ha. I got a bit frustrated about that this morning! He's a smart boy who has learned a lot, but really isn't ready to be reading quite yet. I honestly thought that in 2 weeks I could have him sounding out words, HA! After reading several articles about developmental milestones and boys behavior I am rethinking our approach to his schooling at this point. Ruth is really an exception, she is more advanced than other kids her age and always has been and I need to stop comparing the two of them. She thrives on book work and meticulously forming words, word searches and alphabetizing things. Will is still so wild and wants to explore and be physical. So for now we will be trying to incorporate physical movement while learning letter sounds and go back to learning character traits through scripture stories.
Unfortunately I have steered our learning away from scripture based activities and pushed my kids too hard academically. Don't get me wrong, it's not like they've been sitting at the table for hours every day, I've broken it up into several 15 minute activities...but we have completely dropped our scripture study, articles of faith and learning new primary songs. I think some of this is because both the kids can sit at the computer or on my tablet for an hour doing ABC mouse, starfall, or any of the many educational apps I've found. I equated Will's ability to focus and play an educational game for an hour with him being ready to sit and study math and reading.
Long story short, we're revising Will's education to match his ability and developmental stage. More physical games to reinforce letters and letter sounds. I also got a book called Math Play, that we'll do more activities out of. I'm gonna keep the whole theme idea, but not kill myself trying to make sure each and every activity utilizes the theme.
Here are some pictures of this week's activities. The remainder of the week will be more games and less book work. The theme is Olympics.
Biathlon Event
Torch relay race where they run to me, answer a question (from flashcards we have) and then run back to their teammates and pass off the torch
Here's Ruth sounding out the word she has to read for her turn
We got the LeapFrog Human Body pack to learn about our bodies. The kids love this stuff, it's fun and they learn a ton. We also have the US map and a bunch of the books.
Here Claire is playing in the box the LeapFrog stuff came in
Here Will is being obstinate about matching the upper and lower case letters. This is the 3rd time we've done this activity, this time with the Olympic theme, and he was just not interested.
I feel frustrated about Will not wanting to sit and do school activities, BUT I'm really glad that with some prompting I'm able to adjust what we're doing with what he's ready for and what he needs. I'm SO glad he's not in a preschool that's telling me he's disruptive and won't cooperate. I'm so glad we've decided to homeschool so that as the teacher I can change and adapt and give my kids what the need and help push them just enough so the grow. I'm also grateful that as homeschoolers we can study scriptures so my kids know that God is important to us.
After I gave up all my grand ideas about how things were going to go today: the kids actually had fun and worked on sharing and being kind.
