Homeschool Round-Up
As you know, we're homeschooling for the first time this year! Wesley, our 6 year-old was supposed to enter Kindergarten in August 2020, so we'll be doing kindergarten and first grade with him. Reid our 4 year-old will be doing Pre-K and Kindergarten, and then Nate will just be tagging along learning basic preschool concepts.
If you know me, you know I NEVER wanted to homeschool.
Andrew and I were very much set on private christian schools for our kids....but here we are :) God has been softening my heart for awhile now and obviously a lot is going on in our world so for our family, and with baby girl on the way, this option was best.
I'm still thinking this homeschooling thing will only be 1-2 years but I guess we'll see! We can do anything for a year or two right?! Ha :)
A lot of you are in the same boat as us so I thought I'd share what we decided to buy!
Because I'm not set on homeschooling for more than a year or two, I wanted to try a few things and hop from resource to resource to see what the kids love. I also know we're dealing with the basics here...reading, writing, math, crafts, and all the fun things in between.
If you're wanting to be more structured with one set curriculum, I've heard Abeka and MasterBooks are fantastic! I would most likely end up doing one of those if we homeschool for awhile :)
Thankfully our kids are little, so the expectations aren't as daunting
Although the private christian school we want them in has very high standards and a difficult entrance exam, if they're supposed to end up there they will. My biggest challenge this year will be to take the pressure off of myself and pray for patience and wisdom with each child and to of course, just have fun with it!
I showed everyone what we're buying on Instagram and saved it to my highlights on there. Feel free to check everything out and then message me any time on Instagram to talk about all the things!
Besides the typical crafts and devotionals that we'll be doing, here are the basics!
Bob Books - These come in a set of 12 and are great beginner books for first time readers. I bought stage 1, but there's no set "grade" for each stage :) If we find the kids blazing through, we can always move on to the next!
Flash Cards - My kids LOVE flash cards and it's a fun way to switch things up together.
Counting Cubes - Although my boys use these as swords to fight, you can break them up into 100 cubes for counting! My youngest loves them for color recognition and the older boys love them during their math lessons.
Big Thoughts for Little Thinkers - Besides our morning devotions, I really wanted to introduce more theology into my kids education. These are short and sweet and have already brought up some great conversations.
Scholastic Workbooks - We bought these when COVID first started. With some work books, you can jump around the pages and let your kids do them alone. This is not that type of workbook. We have to start from the beginning and work our way through in order and I need to be sitting right there with them 95% of the time. Very good workbook though.
Writing Without Tears - Love this for beginners! I also love dry erase marker tracing books for beginners learning how to write.
Kindergarten Math - Wesley (6 year old) loves math so I thought this would be a fun extra workbook that could help him! I honestly think Reid (4 year old) will be doing the first half though, and Wesley will be doing the second half.
BIG workbooks - I wanted some extra 1st grade concepts for Wesley during the second half of the year. So I ended up getting Pre-K, Kinder, and 1st for the boys.
Our official first day of school is August 17th, but we already started working through a few of these workbooks. I really wanted to get a good grasp on where each kiddo is at. The boys do best when we switch things up every 15-20 minutes anyways. Maybe that's a boy thing!?
We'll start here and see how things go!
Comment below with what curriculum you're using this year or what adivce you have for first time homeschooling moms!
Thank you so much!
-Nicole