I just love homeschoolers. Moms who homeschool, dads who do, kids who are homeschooled. Especially since they are so horribly unsocialized and weird in every sense of the word…(can you hear the sarcasm??) I was homeschooled by my amazing mother until sophomore year. I’ve known and now know kids to be homeschooled all of high school, but at the time of my sophomore, going to a small private school was a good choice for me (looking back…I should have just stayed at home, but I learned many valuable lessons  in that private school, some so valuable that I quickly blocked out of my memory ;) )

We are a homeschooling family. Abby stayed at home last year for kindergarten, and Zach is here with me for preschool. I will be sending Zach to the wonderful small private school that Abby attends right now (the school we call “homeschool on steroids!”) But every year we will reevaluate to see if it is the right decision for our kids.  I plan on keeping Lily at home for as long as she needs it.

I thought I would share some of my homeschooling activities with you. I am by no means a super homeschooler, I only have a preschooler at home, but I do feel I have a wealth of information on the theories of how to homeschool since I was taught at home for so long. I will be implementing those with Zach and with all my kids as we are always in a state of home schooling.

As far as I am concerned, it is called HOMEschooling…not having school at home. That means we do not sit for 6+ hours at the table and do worksheet after worksheet, nor will we ever, even if we homeschool in high school. The fun of homeschooling is the flexibility of being at home, of being in our own environment and taking advantage of all that we have at our fingertips.

We do projects, play playdough, paint, color, grow a garden (well, we will try to!), plant flowers, make dinner together, and complete chores. School is not just busy work, we learn by example and by using our hands. I want to raise children who know how to cook and cook well. I want them to know how to sew, how to write beautifully and how to type fast.  Homeschool is more about teaching life than about teaching letters and numbers. Letters and numbers are integrated into everything we do! How many eggs do we put in the pancakes? How do we spell egg? What color is the egg? Let’s see what happens when we drop and egg on the floor, on the cement, on a soft towel? and on and on and on…..

I use Ann Ward’s “Learning at Home” curriculum (this book was written in the 80′s and I LOVE the Character Building lessons) and then multiple online sites for preschool print outs. My favorites are Totally Tots (which is really pre-prek but I feel that I can integrate what they do in Tot school quite well with Zach and will be starting some activities with Lily soon) and Confessions of a Homeschooler.  I have so many more sites that I use and will be recommending in the future. But if you are just starting out, those two sites and literally give you everything you need to start on the right foot with your preschooler or elementary school student.

This week we are focusing on the letter J and number 8. On the left he’s putting together his “counting book of 8″, on the right he is putting together our memory verse for the week. No, he can’t read the cards, but he is learning sight recognition and can read the number card.

A simple activity I have him do is go to his room and collect 8 (or the other number we are working on) of one object. This can also be done with colors, shapes, etc. On the right this simple activity is placing the correct number of clips on a paper plate.

{I hope to have more shares about our homeschooling experience! I will be filing them under category “Homeschool”.}