My youngest is four and is in preschool. He goes to a church preschool program three mornings a week. On the other two days, he joins his big brother in homeschool.

When the school year started, I had purchased materials for him to use when he is home with us. Usually he wants to do whatever his big brother is doing so I assumed the same would happen when it comes to learning. I was wrong. He won’t have anything to do with the typical “workbook” like his brother uses for handwriting, spelling, etc. The only workbook he will use without complaint is his math workbook. He seems to enjoy doing simple addition and subtraction problems-so far anyway.

I’ve been trying to find alternative activities to do with him so that he will learn what he needs to learn but in a fun way. For reading, I’ve been giving him a variety of non-workbook activities. He likes a flip book I have where he has to find three of the same types of words (at, op, ig, etc.). He is also more willing to practice handwriting by tracing on dry erase cards than in his handwriting book. I also found an idea online to draw “sight words parking spaces” on poster board and have him drive his cars into the correct spaces. He has loved this. I used one side of the poster board as a neighborhood and the other side as a shopping center parking lot.

And my latest find involves reading, tracing, cutting and pasting. Ian loves cutting so he has really enjoyed these worksheets I found at this blog here. His reading has improved a lot doing these worksheets-and he hasn’t complained:)

I also have a few board games that encourage reading such as POP for Sight Words Game, Silly Sentences (DK Games), Teacher Created Resources Word Racer Game (7811), and ThinkFun Zingo. All of these games he plays willingly and gladly.

He has also developed an interest in word searches. I found a site online that has simple wordsearches using easy words. He also enjoys doing math and reading games online. I guess I just have an untraditional learner:)

Do any of my homeschooling friends have any other ideas?

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We are enjoying our adventures through U.S. History! The past couple of weeks we finished up our in-depth study of the Revolutionary War. Ethan especially enjoyed learning about the spies during the war. We learned how to read secret codes and wrote our own message in invisible ink. We also continue to make our way through the states, learning some history and basic information about each one.

We made a bird feeder during science. We’ve hung it up but since our neighbor has had a bird feeder in his yard for a long time, I doubt the birds will want to try something new. Ethan read a book about the SandHill cranes which are everywhere in our neighborhood. We also made edible birds nests. Any excuse to use chocolate is good for me!

In language arts, we’ve been studying nouns, pronouns and verbs. He enjoyed coming up with a list of verbs. He’s started learning a new poem as well.

We are really enjoying reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, Farmer Boy. The main character talked about putting popcorn into a glass of milk and we tried it. None of the milk overflowed:) Since then, he’s come up with other ideas from the book he wants to try out. I continue to search for books for Ethan to read on his own. He reads at a very advanced level but he’s not mature enough to read books at that level. This week we tried the old-fashioned Hardy Boys series (as a huge Nancy Drew fan I was excited!) and he loves them. This is good because there are plenty of them!

Lastly in my list of updates, since we’ve been talking about the Scottish Covenanter’s during our morning devotions, we decided to make Scottish shortbread this week. So easy to make and all the ingredients we had on hand. And yum!

As we take each step forward in these unfamiliar waters of homeschooling, I am learning as I go. Some mornings, it’s really hard to get the kids rounded up to start school. We’re often irritated with each other-not a good way to start the day.

I’ve been intentionally pausing to pray to begin our day. I pray for clear minds and the ability to concentrate. I pray that we would love God and each other as we make our way through the day. We also start the day by reviewing our catechism and bible memory verse. Lately, our devotions have been from Big Truths for Little Kids: Teaching Your Children to Live for God.

I’ve also found that it’s hard for my son to jump right into schoolwork right away. Who wants to start off the morning doing spelling or math anyway? To help ease our way into schoolwork, we do our “morning work” first.

I’ve posted about some of this before but we’ve added new things as well. We spend about fifteen minutes doing things my son finds interesting.

1. We do a ‘weird word of the day’ which is just a fun way of saying that we learn a new vocabulary word. I try to choose words that my son would find interesting. One week we learned what the names of different cars meant (accord, corolla, etc.). We discuss the word’s meaning, etymology and try to write a sentence using the word.

2. We also like to find out what happened ‘this day in history.’ The History Channel’s website posts what happened in history each day of the week and includes a video to watch.

3. We enjoy doing brain challenges. There’s a great website that gives math, logic and word puzzles to solve.

4. Geography is a favorite of my son’s and he asks each morning to do a geography challenge on the National Geographic site. It’s fun and challenging!

5. We also like to pretend to be detectives and solve mysteries using MindWare Bella’s Mystery Deck.

6. It’s also fun to look up whatever he’s interested in. We look up scientific questions he asks as well as questions about history. Sometimes, what we’ve learned about what happened that day in history will spark more Internet searching.

Do you have any great resources to share?

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I’m finding it difficult to write a weekly post on our progress in homeschooling. But every other week is better than nothing, right?

We are loving all that we’re learning in American History. I say “we” because I am learning too! In the past couple of weeks, we’ve learned more about George Washington. We did a 3D map of his crossing of the Deleware River and enjoyed many books on Washington’s life.

We’ve also studied more about the Revolutionary War. We did history pockets about the life of the soldiers and about famous battles during the war.

We made Johnny Cakes with apple butter. Yum! Apparently the cakes were a staple in the diet of the people during the 1700′s.

On Monday the 31st, we did a unit on Martin Luther, in honor of Reformation Day. We read a wonderful book that explained the reformation quite well. We also read a fictional story about Martin Luther’s son. We did a few activities including making a coat of arms, writing out the sola’s with homemade ink and a feather, listening to the song Luther wrote (Almighty Fortress is Our God) and discussing new vocabulary words associated with what we had learned.

We’ve also begun studying the states. We are learning the state birds and flowers of each state as well as some basic facts. I purchased a huge color in map of the U.S. that Ethan enjoys coloring (MindWare Color Chart: USA). And while studying Georgia, we made peach cobbler:)

We’ve started studying birds in science. I expect we’ll be making a bird feeder sometime soon. A great site I found on birds is enature.com. On the home page each day, they profile a bird of the day.

In music, we’ve been learning about the Nutcracker. Ethan read a story about it and we listened to the music. We enjoyed a cup of hot chocolate as we listened to the “Chocolate” dance and when we listened to the dance of the flutes, I got out my flute for Ethan to see.

Those are the highlights for the past couple of weeks. What have my fellow homeschooling friends been up to?

Have we really been homeschooling for ten weeks? Wow, time goes by quickly! I was gone the past two weeks of homeschool with my husband on a trip. In a perfect world, the kids would have kept up with homeschooling with their sitters, but alas, we do not live in a perfect world. So we’ve had some catching up to do. Not a big deal. The kids have had some difficulty getting back into a routine but we plowed ahead.

Art: Ethan continues to love going to his art class. It’s only once a week at a woman’s home nearby. He’s learned a lot so far. The amazing thing is, he accepts her correction and critique! I was concerned that he would have trouble with it but he accepts it and doesn’t get upset that he doesn’t get it perfect every time. That alone is worth the money:)

History: We are continuing to learn about the beginning of our country. We’ve been studying the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Boston Tea Party, etc. Our History Pockets: The American Revolution has been a wonderful aid to enhancing the curriculum. On Wednesday, we checked online to see what happened that day in history and learned that the Revolutionary War pretty much ended on October 19. We also made a map of Paul Revere’s ride using Interactive 3-D Maps: American History: Easy-to-Assemble 3-D Maps That Students Make and Manipulate to Learn Key Facts and Concepts-in a Kinesthetic Way!. Other fun activities this week: we made hasty pudding (like from the song Yankee Doodle) which is really a lot like grits and made ink out of blueberries to write with using with a feather. I was also able to teach Ethan what I had learned about French history during our trip away. I showed him a picture of a restaurant Ben Franklin frequented while he was in France during the early days of our nation.

Math: We are half way through our math curriculum! I’m hoping to order the second grade math program to begin in January. While he has breezed through the first grade math, I was hesitant to skip the first grade math altogether because I have learned the hard way that if you miss one thing in math, it messes you up for a long time.

Science: We did a few experiments using water and learning about why certain items can soak up water and others can’t. We also did a few experiments on evaporation.

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One of the benefits to homeschooling is that it’s portable. We went on vacation the past week and I was able to bring school work with us (we tagged along with my husband while he traveled for work and when he was working we did school work). Before we left for our trip, we did our science and history at home and brought math, spelling, reading and language arts with us.

History: In MFW Adventures, we learned about the Dutch settlement in New York. We made our own butter-yum! We also started using a history pockets curriculum I found on the Revolutionary War: History Pockets: The American Revolution. I love it! It meets my son’s interest and academic ability right where he is. And my little one enjoyed coloring in pictures of soldiers.

Science: We did an experiment on yeast and watched it blow up a balloon. We also baked homemade bread.

Field Trips: While traveling, we visited an old gold mine in north Georgia. We went underground and learned how they mined for gold in the 1800′s. We saw the tools they used and learned how hard the miner’s worked. We then tried panning for gold ourselves-we even got a few specks to take home. The kids also panned for gems which they really enjoyed (it was a lot less work). This tour of the mind was a great follow up to our unit study on geology we did over the summer.

We also visited an old plantation while in Georgia. The kids got to see how people lived in the late seventeen hundreds to late eighteen hundreds. They saw an old school house, slave cabins, barns, doctor’s house, and of course the big plantation house.

We also did our nature walks while out of town. We did some hiking and spotted quite a bit of wild life. Actually, I think I was more excited about the wildlife we found than my kids were. (“Mom, this is boring standing here taking a picture of a butterfly!”)

This week we continued to learn more about the early pioneers to America, specifically the Pilgrims. We studied about their difficult first year in Massachusetts and the Native Americans who helped them learn how to survive in the New World. We did a neat activity making “oil windows” to understand how the Pilgrims used paper for windows instead of glass. We planted corn. And we made yummy pilgrim hats to eat:) Ethan enjoyed reading a book titled, “If you lived in colonial times” where he learned about the life of children at that time. He found it interesting to learn about some of the discipline methods that were used in the schools-including the dunce hat. We also watched the Peanuts movie on the Mayflower. Love the Peanuts!

In Science we’ve been studying the stars. We made some fun constellations out of marshmallows and toothpicks. (Little Dipper, Draco and Virgo) And we ate a few in the process:) We got to use one of our favorite books,The Heavens Proclaim His Glory: A Spectacular View of Creation Through the Lens of the NASA Hubble Telescope.

Ethan learned a new poem in language arts this week. We also discovered that one of the poems he learned is also in the McGuffey readers from the late 1800′s. He enjoyed flipping through the readers to see what kids his age learned over a hundred years ago.

He also started an art class this week. It’s actually a drawing class. He loved it and is excited about going back next week. The teacher teaches the class out of her home and it happens to be in the neighborhood next to ours.

My three, almost four year old, doesn’t like to participate in school for too long. Sometimes he colors and other times he plays in his room quietly. He does have about twenty minutes of his own work he is required to complete. He uses A Reason for Handwriting: Level A: Manuscript Student Workbook for practicing his handwriting. I also have a math workbook that he enjoys doing. He’s doing simple addition problems right now and doing very well with it. He also reads to me from the Bob Books Set 2-Advancing Beginners. I’m hoping as time goes on that he will become more and more interested in what we are doing.

A few pictures from our week:

Nature study: a spider on our back porch

It’s now our fourth week of homeschooling and we are getting into our groove. This week we learned about the Native Americans of North America. We enjoyed reading about Squanto, a Native American from Massachusetts who befriends the Pilgrims. During “book basket time” my son read about the different tribes around the country. We made a wigwam and a teepee. I also found a recipe to make teepee ice cream cone treats-which we all enjoyed:) We also made clay beads to mimic necklaces worn by some Native American tribes.

We continue to cruise quickly through spelling, language arts and math lessons. He really enjoys memorizing the poems. During bible time, we made a candle holder to remind us that Jesus is the light of the world. Ethan reminded me of the time I had the kids wander the house in the dark with flashlights attached to their bibles to teach them how scripture is “a lamp to our feet.” He’s hoping we’ll do it again since we’re studying about Jesus being the light of the world.

He’s starting to really enjoy the drawing curriculum we got through MFW. It’s a good thing since he starts art classes next week:)

On our nature walk, we found things growing on my dead crepe myrtle tree (so sad). Ethan informed me that it was covered with air plants. We had a close call while standing in front of the tree. Ethan was standing in an ant pile without realizing it. Thankfully he had sneaker on, which I quickly tore off his feet as they were covered with ants. Lesson learned, always look where you are standing!