I have to admit, I love planning for school.  Searching through all the options that are available to the kids is very exciting.

This past year has worked pretty well for us.  Really, the hardest part of it was getting lessons done with a 2 year old crazy man bouncing around us.  And sometimes, I can distract him with some fun game but them Kaia wants to play too and ignores the lesson.  So, we’ve all learned a good bit about flexibility this year!

This summer, we do plan to do a little schooling.  We will play lots of math games and read living math books so that Kaia can keep up her skills.  Kaia is still very resistant to writing, so I’m going to encourage writing of any sort over the summer.  And, since we’ve not really done much geography, we will learn a bit about the oceans, continents, cultures and such.  I’m going to try to keep it laid back, though.  I could use a break, too, ya know!

In the fall, Kaia will technically be in the 3rd grade and we are planning the following:

Language Arts – Michael Clay Thompson level 1 (I’ve read such good things about this!  I’m excited to give it a try) This will be our basic curriculum and I don’t think we will need to add much more.  We will continue with Sequential Spelling (Kaia has been enjoying this a lot and I think it’s important for her to get some spelling practice since she doesn’t like to write often).  I think she will probably finish up HWT Cursive early in the year.  Other than that, there will be lots of reading.  Kaia reads up a storm, so I may put some books around the house for her to find, but I don’t think I’ll have much in the way of required reading.

Math – I’m thinking that we will continue using Right Start Math (levels D and E), just more loosely.  I think it moves to slowly for Kaia.  So, we’ll use what we need and make it a richer experience with living math books, experiments, Mythmatical Battles, Math Rider, and such.  I may add in a little Mind Benders and Math Analogies occasionally.  I’m even thinking of getting this Algebra primer.  I think she would really dig something like it.

Science – Kaia said she was interested in studying Anatomy and Electronics next year.  So, we plan to do lots of kits and experiments.  Toby will take on the electronics since he knows lots about it.  But we will probably start with something like this kit and expand from there.  For Anatomy, we will use kits from Horrible Science like this one, The Magic School Bus kit, as well as lots of books, dissections and stuff.  I may get the REAL Science Biology book to pull ideas from too.  (We used their Chemistry book this past year and felt it left a lot out.  The labs were generally too simple, but I still liked having the book as a starting point.) We’ll see.  (I just found this from Winter’s Promise.… Hmmm… might be something worth looking into.)

History – We’ve been using the History Odyssey curriculum for our Ancient History, but we basically only using it to follow the schedule of who to read about next.  This next year, I think we will use the Usborne Internet-linked Encyclopedia of World History as our spine.  We ended up referencing it more than our curriculum.  We are both very excited to study the Middle Ages next year.  We are already planning our trip to the Renaissance Faire in the fall!!  We’ll also supplement with lots of living history books and crafts.

Art – We started off this past year using Artistic Pursuits.  I really liked it how it connected the history we were studying with a the art, but Kaia didn’t like being told how to create her art.  So, we ended up using it less and less often.  I’d like to find something to introduce her to famous artists and art techniques, but I’m not sure what we’ll use yet.

Music – Continue Piano lessons

Foreign Language – Kaia wants to study Spanish.  I am looking for a local class.  I feel like that would be more effective for her than a computer course or something.  I don’t remember enough of it to feel like I could be a good teacher.

xtra stuff – Homeschool co-op, nature walks, Aerial gymnastics

For Leif, I’ll have to see where he is at in the fall.  We will definitely continue with letters and numbers. lots of hands on play.  There are lots of curricula out there for pre-schoolers that look great (like this one from Winter’s Promise and this one from Little Acorn Learning) and I love to have things organized and planned out, but I’m thinking my 2-3 year old just really needs to play and experience the world without too much structure.  We’ll see.

Let’s hear what your plans are!

Ever since I first saw sandpaper alphabet cards on another mama’s blog, I’ve been wanting a set of these for Leif.

I found small wooden cards at the local crafts store, along with felt capital letters and super sparkly, textured lower case letters.  The red felt letters are actually stickers.  So, Kaia took charge of sticking them to the wood.  The purple letters needed the hot glue gun.

Then this wonderful set of alphabet cards needed it’s own sweet carrying bag.

I hope they will get lots of use!

Want a fun way to encourage story telling and writing in your home?  Create a story board!

If you are sew crafty, you can sew some pockets onto a larger piece of fabric.  If you don’t sew, what about using poster board and gluing or stapling on paper pockets?

I sewed 12 pockets (about 4 inches wide, although next time I may make them larger) onto a large piece of felt.  Those are 3×5 cards, just for size reference.

Label these pockets.  We used the 5 W’s and ‘How’

Fill your pockets up with your ideas.  For example, ‘who’ could be grandma, Snoopy and Woodstock, the cat, Frosty the Snowman… ‘where’ might be the cellar, on Mars, under the table… Get the picture?

Then, have your kids take one piece of paper from each pocket without peeking at them.  With these they can create their story.  They can tell the story, act it out, write it down, draw it… however they want to create their story.  It can lead to some great fun!

And you don’t have to stop at the 5 W’s.  You can put whatever label on these pockets that you like.  For younger ones you can put a color, shape, letter, or number label on each pocket.  We put colors on each pocket and had Leif sort colored tiles and blocks.  You could do the same with shapes, letters and numbers using toys, refrigerator letter and number magnets, etc.

Kaia just went to the story board and pulled out these:

• Who: Mom and Dad
• What: Got an ugly haircut
• When: in the distant future
• Where: in a dungeon
• Why: Because he burned his tongue

So… what kind of story would you make with this?

Kaia and I took a break from our regularly scheduled math this morning after seeing some of these videos by Vihart.  She calls herself a ‘recreational mathemusician’, but that doesn’t come near describing how cool her brain is!  By watching just a couple of her videos Kaia and I found ourselves discussing fractals (again) which she loves, the concept of infinity, mobius strips, and a bunch more mathematical concepts.  For a 7 year old, that’s pretty advanced math.  But, when you bring it down to art, it seems so much easier to grasp.

Kaia immediately grabbed some paper and a pencil and set to doodling.

Here’s her ‘infinite series of circles, inside of an infinite number of circles”!

And more math doodles.

What a great way to spend a morning!

Here’s Vi’s blog if you want more of her creative mind!

We started school today… Kaia is now an official second grader and Leif began his pre-pre-pre K studies.  (He he, ok, so he ran around grabbing pencils, walking over workbooks, and sitting on Kaia.  I did read him The ‘A’ Book, though!)  I like the schedule I have mapped out for this first semester.  On paper, it seems pretty manageable.  Even with breakfast, chores and many interruptions, we were still done by 1 pm.  Then, the mail lady arrived bringing two boxes of yummy goodness that I’d ordered to add more fun to our homeschool days.  Kaia immediately dove into it all!  In our boxes we got:

Unjournaling – I didn’t think we’d actually start this until late in the year, but Kaia wanted to dictate some journal entries to me.

Funny Fairy Tale Proofreading- again, Kaia wanted to keep doing this late into the afternoon.  I finally had to tell her I was done teaching for the day 🙂

The Periodic Table – We are starting chemistry this year, and though a lot of this is beyond her at this point, I still thought this would be a fun way to learn about the elements.  She ended up flipping through it for over an hour to find the ‘cute’ elements.

Amelia Rules – I got the first three books in this series and they look adorable.  Kaia is really starting to get into reading.  Over the summer she’s really bloomed.  So, since she loves comic books, I thought this would help fan her interest.

Vocabulary Power – Idioms – This is an idiom a day flip-type book.  Each day gives you a new idiom (like It’s raining cats and dogs) and what it really means.  Kaia said “do I have to do only one a day”

Vocabulary Power – Words – Another flip book… I thought this would be a great way to add new vocabulary words to our days.  Each page has a word, pronunciation, definition, and use in a sentence.  Any words that Kaia doesn’t know we add to our vocabulary list.  Occasionally I will draw from these words and their definitions for copy work.

Haiku Stickies – We haven’t really done much in the way of poetry yet, but I couldn’t pass these up!    They are yellow sticky pages with partially written haiku on them.  You fill them in and stick them some where to be found!  How cool is that.  I thought this would be a fun way to introduce some poetry.  (And what’s really cool is that the author, Allan Wolf, is a friend of mine…. we met in Tae Kwon Do)  (Sarah, don’t get these for Meg… she’ll be getting some for her birthday!)

First Art – I had to get something for Leif, too.  This looks like it’s going to be a great project book for keeping little hands occupied.  Thanks for the recommendation Nikki.

Kaia is doing well recovering.  She can almost straighten her leg and the swelling is almost gone.  She’s still using a walker, but she’s gotten super fast!  You have to watch out for her if she’s moving around or she’ll run over your toes!

Here’s the little foot hammock she created on her walker.

And here’s speedy gonzales!  See, she’s just a blur when she gets going!

We took everyone peach picking this weekend.  Kaia got pulled around in a wagon… pampered princess.  She was actually easier to pull than the load of peaches we got.  In the end we had 2 bushels of peaches, a peck of apples, a gallon of apple cider, and a dozen fresh apple cider doughnuts!!  (Umm, yeah, there’s only one doughnut left!)