Homeschooling (Introduction)

We are in an awkward situation - we relocated from Southern California to Madison Wisconsin late in the summer and put our Cali home up for sale.  It has just now entered escrow (fingers crossed it all goes well!) but we haven't found a home here in Wisconsin yet....so the bottom line is that we are homeschooling.  The school year has begun and we are in temporary housing so to avoid putting the kids in a school and then it not being our home school when we do buy - we are homeschooling.

I've always wanted to try homeschooling - and it is just as much fun as I thought it would be!  We have had a blast and LOTS of adventures!  But it takes a lot of time to prepare too....that's why the blog posts have been light lately....

Now that we somewhat have a routine - I am finally ready to share some of the cool things that we do during our week!

We have 2 types of activities - there are the daily goals and the weekly goals.  Here is a breakdown:

Daily

• Math drills using "Math Fact Master" on the iPad
• Allows you to customize their problems and keeps simple progress reports
• Math special topic
• varies by the week; topic is general enough for both 4th and 2nd graders to work on worksheets independently and activities together
• Grammer special topic
• varies by the week but each week is focused on a part of speech or a grammar topic
• Spelling practice is a list at the beginning of the week and a test at the end
• Science experiments are done daily
• Craft projects are done daily
• Reading is done daily
• We are using the reading comprehension app "Super Reader Comprehension" and my 2nd grader LOVES it
• Code.org is used as a reward along with board games if they accomplished all their work for the day

Weekly

• Each week the kiddos have to agree on a "special topic" 
• It is something that they both want to learn more about
• Then they are assigned a challenge (report; diorama; poster; skit, etc.)
• And they make an iMovie about their topic
• We continuously update our nature notebook
• This is a Keynote (ppt for MAC) presentation that the girls add new slides to for each topic that they find interesting while we are exploring outside or for a question that they ask about nature
• We are working to switch focus to outreach opportunities
• We put together "Boo Bags" for the two kids that we have found that live in our building.

More to come!  Stay tuned...

Enjoy :-)