First week of homeschooling

Last week was our first week of homeschooling.  It wasn't a "normal" week because we spent the afternoons helping my sister who has back problems, but we did get in almost all the subjects (missed out on science and manners).  It's still early to tell much about the curriculum I've chosen, but the Five in a Row lessons went well and Jovi really likes the reading lessons.  I had kind of planned for this, but Corbin is not always in a "lesson" mood so a few days last week we just played together which was fun too.  So far I am not excited about the Math lessons.  We've been doing colors, shapes and counting to 10 and that is with doubling up on lessons.  She's willing to do it and likes the games we do before the worksheet, but she isn't learning anything new.  I talked with someone and they said that Horizons Math starts out slow and then speeds up fast, I'd say we are ready for it to speed up.  Our Five in a Row book this week was Madeline.  We had lots of fun learning about France.  Jovi is able to find France on our world wall map without help.  This doesn't translate to other maps yet, but it was her first week of working with any maps at all so I'd say it is a good start.  We put together a notebook with all the things we learned last week using lots of cute minibooks from Homeschoolshare so she will have a way to review her lessons.  I'll try to take a picture of it and next week's notebook to give you an idea of what we are doing.  On Friday we went to la Madeline for lunch, Jovi was very excited to find out that croissants were French and had a croissant peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

We read The Little Rabbit (Pictureback(R)) for Corbin's Before Five in a Row lesson.  A very cute book.  It is about a little girl who gets a pet rabbit.  We talked about baby animals ,colors, pets and on Thursday went and got the kids their very own own pets.  Two beta fish in their own PLASTIC bowls (our last beta died when its pretty glass bowl was accidentally pushed off the counter and shattered, very sad).  I wanted to get goldfish, but they apparently need very large tanks and a filter.  This is not what I remember as a child who had feeder goldfish as pets.  They lived in a normal fishbowl and seemed to do just fine, but I guess betas are just as good and they are very easy to take care of.  The kids were SO excited.  Jovi named her fish Rainbow Rose.




Corbin named his fish Blue Fish. We got our last beta fish when Jovi was two and she named it Blue so I think it is an age thing. Kids this age are just really literal, it's funny.




I'm not planning on taking them to restaurants and getting them pets regularly or anything, but I thought we should do a few special things for our first week.  It's been fun and we look forward to next week.