How is school going?

A lot of you have been asking how our school year is going so far. We are still trying to figure out what schedule works best for us, but things are going great.

We have completed our second full week of school and have already readjusted our schedule. We now wait until Madelynn goes down for her nap at 1pm to start our lessons.

This means that Alyssa and Allison no longer get a nap in the afternoon, but I knew this was coming for awhile now. By doing our lessons while Madelynn sleeps, we have two solid hours to focus on just our school work.

We take a small break every 15 minutes to use the restroom, get a drink or play a game on the computer. I've noticed that Allison needs that little break to stay focused. 

We have learned the letters Ff and Bb so far and the girls are both doing fabulous. We use their white boards more than anything and they love that.

I think the hardest part, for me anyway, is finding appropriate coordinating crafts and projects to do daily. Most people would think that would be fun, but it's exhausting to find something new and different everyday and still make it go along with what they are learning that day.



The one main problem that I have is the girls looking at each others worksheets and copying one another. Thank goodness for privacy partitions. {$2.95 each}

As much as I have tried to make the dining room work as a learning room, it's just too small. Luckily for me, the girls don't really use their toy room as much as I thought they would. They go in, grab their toy of choice and play in their bedrooms.

We are currently transforming their toy room into their learning room. I'm excited to have the space to spread out, use their individual desks, have my desk in the same room, and have reference posters on the wall for them to look at. 

Being new to homeschooling, (meaning that I attended a public school and am still getting used to things myself) I am having a hard time finding things for the girls to do for indipendent studies. They can't read and that makes it difficult to just send them off with an assignment. I found these amazing (already laminated) cards on a metal ring for them to flip through. We have step 1 sight words, step 2 sight words, and a basic skills set with every letter of the alphabet, all colors and numbers to 20.

I usually send one girl off to study those while I work with the other one on whatever I think they need help with. If they are both doing well that day then I do a few Brain Quest problems with them.

If we finish the lessons before Madelynn wakes from her nap then the rule is that they must watch educational TV instead of cartoons (example: animal planet, national geographic, etc.). This worked out in my favor last week as it was Shark Week. We will see how this week goes.

xoxo