Homeschool Schedule mid-year changes.

After an extended Christmas break....okay, okay, November until the middle of January type extended break, we are back at it! I took the week before we started up again to re-evaluate our plans and the things we were doing and decided we needed to change things up a little.

We started the year out with this schedule that I blogged about back in September: Our Homeschool Learning, but are now on a new schedule and it seems to be going great so far!

The 1st change I made was to scrap the calendar binders, honestly they got boring and old quick. We now just start by putting the date up on our calendar

Each day we just add the date, and then say the day and month. This is what we are using as our calendar. I just created and laminated the month cards and the number cards myself, and did a different theme for every month.

After we do the date, we pray. This is something I didn't think to add to our schedule in September. The kids each take a turn thanking Jesus for things, usually for Daddy's work, his safety at work, and hoping for a good time with school today.

After our prayer time we sing a song. I try to find it on YouTube to play and we sing along. Today we did "Our God is an Awesome God". They are just learning these songs and are not able to sing a long very well right now but they love it and I think they will know the songs soon enough!

Next we do our Bible memory verse. KDude (age 5) memorizes the verse he is supposed to for Sunday School each week and Strawberry (age 3) is memorizing the verses that I ordered with our Bible curriculum. They are both excellent at doing this and Strawberry surprises a lot of people when she recites a verse complete with correct reference at 3 years old. We do 1 verse a week and it seems to be exactly the right pace for both of them. Once they are readers there is so much more we could do during this time.

After we do our memory work it is on to what they call "Bible Time".

We are still using the same curriculum we started with, which was Children Desiring God's "He Established a Testimony". The only change we have made in the Bible teaching time is that I have complimented this curriculum with Betty Luken's Bible in Felt. It is a little pricey but will be used for so long that it is completely worth it. Just get ready to cut! The 600+ pieces it advertises.....you cut each one of them out. This has really helped engage the kids during the story, instead of trying to picture it for themselves they remember because of the visuals. This week's lesson is about Abraham and Sarah and the birth of Isaac.

The next subject we move on to is Math. We are still using Math-U-See's Primer. On Monday's we watch the video of Steve instructing the week's lesson

Then there are 6 worksheets pages per lesson and we just divide those up through the week. Dude did the first one for this week today, we are doing the first lesson on addition!

We finish off everyday with our Language lessons. Dude has now mastered his letters upper and lowercase. He knows which upper goes with which lowercase letter. He can write them all, and he can find them if I call them out. So, we have moved on to the sounds they make in preparation for reading. I found an amazing site to help with this (and more advanced stuff too). It is Starfall. We have just started with 3 letters per day, and he works through them himself and checks them off on his list as he completes each one. We will likely repeat this cycle a few times until he really gets it.

There you have it. Our new homeschool day. This is the reason I love homeschool, we can just change anything at anytime to make it suit us. This schedule is going really well and we are really learning a lot with it. YAY! So, we will continue like this....until its time to freshen it up again, that is.


For His Glory!