school time

Since we got a late start to the school year, we are still in session.  We have a little over a month left until we are finish.  Even when we finish the curriculum, I plan to keep going so we don't stray off course. 

I'm still trying to decide if I should just have our Kindergarten curriculum shipped here, or save a few bucks and have it shipped to my mom's house.  I want to implement a year round school year.  I think it seems like it would be more effective, especially for little ones.  We can then do three days a week and not feel guilty about skipping days here or there.  And, we eliminate any review time.

Anyway, just thinking out loud.  The girls seem to be retaining the alphabet and numbers fairly well.  It is funny to see how easily one of them picks up on certain things and the other not so easily.  But, their age difference (14 months) doesn't seem to be any issue.  We are just doing basic stuff.  But, I don't see a problem keeping them on the same level of work.

When we start our school day, I get out the flash cards and review the letters and number (and shapes) that we have already went over.  We go through all the letters and numbers in order, then I mix them up and we go through them again.  After that, we get out our little chalkboards and I say a letter/number and the girls have to write the uppercase and lowercase letter/number on the chalkboard.  As you will see in the picture below, I put a tray between the girls so they can't see what the other one is writing.  (We have discussed cheating, but the tray just makes it easier.)  We eliminate wasting paper and ink doing it on the chalkboard.

We still do some printouts.  I need to buy a couple binders to store all their work for the year.  I mean, I'm their mom, I can't throw away all their hard work.  Plus, I think they will enjoy looking back at how far they have come.  I got the idea of how to organize from this pin on Pinterest.  Just need to make a trip to Office Max.

Here the girls are drawing their favorite farm animal.  They draw very similarly.  Kind of funny.  Emily is getting a lot better about drawing in details. 

I can't believe we are almost done with our first year of homeschooling.  For all the worrying I did before we started, it hasn't been all that bad.  I do sometimes wish that there was an English school that I could send them to here.  But, I guess I will have to do.