Falloween

This month has been a lot of fun with homeschool after all shouldn't kindergarten be fun? I was really impressed with Kayiah's idea to paint a candycorn pumpkin ( which we got for free at the farm fieldtrip)

 my pumpkin and milenah's pumpkin, while doing things like this I try really hard to not interfere with Milenah's crativity and let her do what she wants... It's not what I would have wanted but thats not the point. Note to self even though we are in a drought and had no chance of rain the washable paint dries and flakes right off of these pumpkins.

 math was shapes this month and counting by 5's and 10's to 100. We used candy corn as our counters.

 triangles and art colors and candy corn, Kayiahs made really cute window art and M's got hung up inside

 1/3s yeah those are taught with candycorn/ art and creativity all in 1.

It's hard to be a homeschooler!

Just another day at school. Phonics and handwriting on the beach. Hey if writing in the sand was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for us!

Rubberband Boards

We love our Rubberband boards.  We took a break from numbers to focus on shapes for a few weeks since there is just so much fun to be had and Fall crafts to make.  Kayiah had a lot of fun making her shapes in all sizes with these boards. They also work really well for letter practice. I know these aren't the best pics but I was focusing more on the lesson not the pictures.

Two random complaints that I have come across and thought I would pass along. In a Bert and Ernie math book I use for some extra math work they had an octagon labeled as a hexagon poor Kayiah kept telling me she was counting 8 sides not 6. She was right the book was wrong, it was just a dollar tree book so no biggie really.  A book I checked out of the library Called Caiou and the new family, I checked it out for family week and I thought it was going to talk about a new family that moved in. I guess I should have read the back of the book first but normally these books are really ok. The book is on divorce and talks about his cousins parents not loving each other any more.  Then it asks if "uncle Teo" is their new daddy and the little girl says no that it's mommy's boyfriend. I about freaked since Lew was reading the book to the girls. His eyes were as wide as saucers. Needless to say we stopped the book there, told Kayiah that mommy and daddy will always love each other and never leave each other because we are committed to each other and our family and b/c we made a promise to God to do so. We didn't even touch on the boyfriend thing b/c honestly Im not sure Kayiah even knows what a "boyfriend" is.

Our First Week

This week I started with the theme  God Made Me. I didn't buy a set curriculum for Kindergarten because I knew I wanted to come up with themes to study through out the year.  Most likely for the higher grades I will look into something more specific but I was pretty confident in my ability to teach her what she needs to know for this year. For Science I found a few books from the library ( my most loved homeschooling resource) that talked about your insides, a basic intro to bones and muscles. For math we reviewed the numbers 1-5 and did different worksheets and worked with manipulatives.  For language we reviewed all of our letter sounds to be sure we would be ready to start our alpha-phonics program that my friend was kind enough to lend me to use with her. Writing was specific practice for letters l,t and i following her Kumon workbook and of course all the extra writing practice she gets just from other exercises. For social studies we started our God Made Me  book, kayiah loves this sort of work because it requires her to use her creativity ( an area she really excells in)  we usually save this for the last subject of the day. So this is the start of my blog on homeschooling a kinderkid, I'm not sure how often it will be updated if I will keep it in this format or what but I thought it would be fun to try. I'm tired of messing with this blog tonight and I have to get my kids into bed so this is the post you are getting : )

a pretty simple exercise in math we started this week reviewing the numbers 1-5



a math/ language lesson, I sent Kayiah on a hunt to find five things that began with the letter L and then she logged them in her math/science notebook.



painting letter "T's" with tea. This was a big hit for Kayiah and a welcome break from regular lined whiteboard practice.