5 Days of Homeschool Encouragement: Work it in Wednesday

Welcome back to the 5 Days of Homeschool Encouragement Back to School Blog Hop from the Homeschool Review Crew. I am so glad you are here. My fellow Crew Mates and I hope you've been finding encouragement this week. On Monday I shared how I stay motivated on this homeschool path, and yesterday I decided we would "take a look" at our 2018-2019 curriculum. Of course, being a part of the Crew, things change up quite a bit, but our core always stays the same. Today we are going to look at how I fit it all in.

One of the things I love about homeschooling is how flexible it is. I can look at our schedule at any time and see where I might need to tweak something. Though, I admit, once I get a schedule down I find it hard to have to switch things around. I've never been a fan of change. However, each year it seems we are changing up something in our schedule to make it work better. Usually they are just little alterations. In fact, I really liked the way our days were flowing last school year after the few changes I had made. However, due to some recent changes at the YMCA, we are going to be making some big changes in our schedule this year. 

See, we joined the Y a few years ago so I could get healthier, and now getting exercise into

 our days is very important to me,. Going to the Y used to be about the hubby and I getting exercise; however, last year Tabitha (and sometimes Amelia) joined me for Zumba. I figured it was a great way for them to get their P.E. requirement in. Unfortunately, that class was put on hold during the summer, and it looks like it isn't making a comeback. During the summer I found a few different classes that I enjoyed, as does Tabitha. Amelia comes with us occasionally. The only problem is, these classes are all in the morning. Sooo, in order to work them into our school year, I needed to do some major flip-flopping of the schedule. Thankfully, I think I have it worked out. Though I won't know for sure until school officially starts. I guess if it doesn't work out, I will have to tweak some more. 

Our school time is going to be pushed back to the afternoon and possibly the evening, leaving the morning free for exercise on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. In October we will start back up with co-op on Wednesday mornings. Mondays, and Wednesdays when we don't have co-op, we will devote our mornings to art, music and science, playing catch up where we need to. Those are the subjects we fell behind in the most last year. 

Here's a look at my tentative schedule. As I said, I will have to evaluate it once school starts to see if it will need some more tweaking.

Of course, with a change in our daily schedule, the children's routine time had to be altered a bit too. We used to have what we called "Morning Routine" and "Afternoon Routine." This is when they took their turns on the new computer, old computer, WiiFit U, and math drill (in the morning) or mommy time (in the afternoon). Now these routines will come back-to-back after lunch, which will take some getting used to. These are the times when the children work on math and any review products we have online. 

  

So, with school less than two weeks away, I think I have some clue what our days are going to look like. I am thankful for My Father's World which gives us one day of the week that is more relaxed than the others, so I can work co-op in without making me crazy. I am thankful that I can be flexible in order to adjust our schedule due to changes at the Y, or the addition of Bible Quizzing, which the girls are just starting up. Of course, this flexibility assures me that we will be able to fit school in even if we have such things as dentist or doctor appointments. Unlike public school, where the child(ren) would be absent, we can just take some work with us for in the van or the office, change up our schoolwork for the day, or move it to the weekend. I love homeschool flexibility!! Don't you?

Here are some of the other participants in this week's blog hop, and you will find more in the linky below.

Nicole @ Bless Their Hearts Mom
Patti @ Truth and Grace Homeschool Academy
Rebekah @ There Will Be a $5 Charge For Whining
Rodna @ Training Children up for Christ
Stacy @ A Homemakers Heart
Tess @ Circling Through This Life
Wendy @ Life at Rossmont
Yvie @ Gypsy Road

Organizing My Day with the Well Planned Day Planner {A Back to School Review}

I have been working valiantly to get my life organized this year. Organization is my word for 2014, and so far, I haven't been succeeding near as much as I had hoped to. As we are heading into the start of the homeschool year, I was thrilled to be able to receive a copy of The Well Planned Day 2014-2015 Family Homeschool Planner from Home Educating Family Association-hedua. 

This planner is chock full of ways to keep me organized, if I can stay disciplined enough to continue using it through the school year.  There are encouraging articles form the Home Educating Family Magazine and plenty of room for notes, spread throughout the year. Instructions are given for various scenarios in using the planner, such as using it with 1, 2, 3 or 4 students. 5 Core subjects are included with space for 2 more. Even household pages are included, such as household finances and household duties. There are pages to write down both the teacher's and the student's schedules, and then it moves into the monthly and weekly calendars. The monthly calendar is a double page spread, as are the weekly pages for each month.

Stay tuned for the full review.

Working on Organization with Motivated Moms Chore Planner eBook {A TOS Review}

I may have mentioned that organization is not one of my strong points. In fact, my word for 2014 is "Organization" as I have decided I really need to get more organized if I am going to work on my stress levels. So, I was thrilled when I was given the opportunity to review one of the Motivated Moms eBooks from Motivated Moms.  I was really looking forward to using this chore planning system. I was given the choice of 1 out of 16 different eBooks. There are regular sized planners that take up a whole page and half-sized planners that print out two pages per sheet. There are planners with one day per page and planners with one week per page. You can choose to get each of these with or without a Bible reading schedule. In addition, the planners are available in black and white or color.  First let me tell you which book I chose and why. I decided to go with the 2014 Motivated Moms Half-Sized Page Per Day Planner in Black and White. 

Having two pages on one sheet seemed to be the more frugal way to go as we would use less paper and less ink, though we did need to go out and buy a small binder to put it in. I decided on black and white for the same reason. Having a colored border did make it prettier but it does not change the functionality and it would have unnecessarily used colored ink. Now, the reason I chose the Daily Planner over the Chore Planner is that the Chore Planner has the entire week on one sheet. This would be great for someone who wants to see the entire week at once, but personally, it was too cluttered for my mind to work with. 

I have been printing out a month at a time to go easy on the printer ink. I realize some people may want to print it all out at once and get it bound. As getting something bound is not that easy of a thing to do in our rural community I thought that a binder would be an acceptable way to hold my planner and it is working really well.

I love the fact that, not only is it a checklist of specific "chores" that should be completed each day, it also includes a calendar for appointments (separated in hour increments).  The chores include exercise, make bed, empty trash, etc.  Each day also includes different weekly items such as "'clean shelves in refrigerator" or "vacuum bedrooms".  These are the things that I tend to not budget time for and then, by the time I think of them, it seems like an impossible task to complete which frustrates me because I feel I should be doing other  things.  Using this checklist, things don't get out of hand like they used to and I am remembering to do those daily tasks. Even hubby has been making the bed when he wakes up for work. 

I also like that there is an item on your checklist for "quiet time".  Nothing relieves stress like spending some quiet time with the Lord.  This is something that I enjoy doing and I found it helps my day go much smoother.  Hubby's only complaint is that it should be listed first as it is the most important thing on the list, but since I don't necessarily do things in the order listed, I don't mind. Though he does make a good point. It's still nice to have a visual reminder to stop, pray, and spend the time I need with God. The square for meal planning is also a very nice tool.  We're on a limited food budget (who isn't these days) and it's nice to be able to look ahead and see that all we need for supper is some potatoes or some cheese.  It's also helpful that with hubby's backwards work schedule I can look ahead and make sure things are out of the freezer in plenty of time to be ready to make before he had to leave. There is also a two-week menu planner at the end of the eBook. I have to confess, I forgot that it was there. I remember reading about it when I was researching Motivated Moms, but when I received my eBook it had slipped my mind. As I am only printing out one month at a time, I just didn't notice it. As it is a new month, this is something I do want to put to use as I know my days went smoother back when I was doing my weekly menu planning. I should probably add hubby's work schedule to the appointment log to prevent me from scheduling appointments late in the day that he has to work but we haven't done that yet.  I did, however, notice that I had an appointment scheduled for a date that we were talking about being out of town. This planner helped me realize that well in advance so I can change it/before it's last minute. I do have to say, I wish this planner was a tad more customize-able. There are quite a few tasks that just don't fit our life, such as feeding the pets and using the dishwasher. I do like that I can add some tasks down the bottom as some lines were left blank, but I am crossing out tasks quite a bit. Additionally, I would have loved to see a few blank lines left for those weekly chores as there are times I can not do certain chores on the assigned day. For instance, because hubby works nights, I can not do any "master bedroom" chores on the days that he is upstairs sleeping or, as another example, I would put some more time-intensive tasks on Saturday instead of Wednesday as Wednesday is our homeschool co-op day. All in all, I am so very thankful for this planner that is keeping me motivated and getting me organized. It is a slow process because of how cluttered the house has gotten and sometimes I have to forgo some of the tasks listed so I can get other needed tasks done. (Not having my dishwasher anymore means I am spending a LOT of time washing dishes for our family of 6 that eats 3 meals at home almost every day.) If you need a bit of motivation, there may just be a planner that fits your style from Motivated Moms. You can purchase each of the eBooks from Motivated Moms for $8.00. The also have an app available for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android. Unfortunately we didn't have the option to try out the Android app, because we recently got tablets from our cell phone provider and it would have been really cool to try it out. You can see what my fellow Crew mates think of the eBooks they chose or the app by clicking on the banner below.

5 Days of Homeschooling Essentials- Day 2: Organization

Anyone who knows me in real life know that organizational skills do not come my way naturally. In fact, they tend to run the other way! I haven't been near as organized as I would like as I need to be. This is something I am working on, not just in our homeschool but in our house and other aspects of my life. In fact, "Organization" is my Word for 2014 because I know that it is essential, not just for our homeschool, but for peace in our daily lives.

What are some things I am working on toward organization?

I am working on decluttering, which I hear will not only help with my stress levels (being able to find things when I want them is definitely less stressful), but may also help alleviate some of my memory problems as well (from what the hubby had been reading).

I am working on creating a schedule for my day, limiting my time on the computer and making sure I am getting necessary things accomplished. I have actually started setting a timer to help make me aware of the amount of time I have spent on different tasks. Even if I am in the middle of something I will stop and wait to finish it later so I can stay on schedule. I don't have a specific schedule written out yet, but I am working on it. As I stated recently, little steps at a time. I am looking forward to the opportunity to review one of the Chore Planners from Motivated Moms to help keep me on task. You can look for the review the first week of March.

One of the biggest things that has helped me keep from getting completely disorganized in our homeschool time was adopting a workbox system.  I had read about workboxes here and there but wasn't sure if they would be for us. I am so glad I gave it a shot. At first I thought it was going to be too expensive and take up too much space. I had seen pictures of other's workbox systems where they have sets of drawers to keep their children's work in. I have to tell you now, I knew those would be way beyond our financial reach and NOT an essential for our homeschool. Then I was directed to a blog called, The Mother's Journal where the author had shared about using cereal boxes for her child's workbox system. This seemed quite promising.

Here, let me share how I have been organizing our school work.

I start by having the year's work all laid out by unit in file folders in a box that I keep under our activity table. Fortunately this is easy to do using the My Father's World curriculum. The student sheets we purchased, along with any of the letter of the week ideas from the past are in each letter unit's folder.

At the beginning of each week I take the pages and place them in folders labeled by day. Currently we are on a 6-day system, taking 2 weeks (3 Days each week) to finish a unit. We are actually going to be switching to a 4-day system (taking 1 week) after we finish our K unit. These folders will remain about the same, except the 3rd folder will just be for Miscellaneous work each week. 

Each morning we have lesson time I take their workboxes and remove the previous day's work to check it over. After I file that work I put the new work in the workbox.

As the girls finish each activity they take the number off of the workbox and place it on the chart on the side of the bookshelf.

When we first started I was using mini post-it notes that I had handy. However, when I ran out of those I found it to be more frugal to write the numbers on a little rectangular piece of card stock and use Velcro to attach them to both the boxes and the chart (Yes, this is an old picture that I took at the beginning of the school year. The bookshelf isn't quite this organized right now, but the system is the same.). 

When we first started the girls would work on their workboxes at the same time. However, just this week the girls began alternating working on their workboxes and having computer time.  I can rotate between them and have time with the younger children. We will see how this change works.

This organization system has become essential for me to keep some sort of order in our homeschool. Even when nothing else is going quite right, I can keep us moving along by filling the workboxes so the girls know what to do.

How do you keep organized in your homeschool?

I invite you to stop back tomorrow as I discuss another important essential for homeschooling, Hands-On Experiences.

As I mentioned, there are many more insightful posts to be found. Here is the link to the main post on the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog where you can find a list of everyone who is sharing. To get you started, I invite you to stop by these blogs:

Mary @ Winecup Christian Homeschool talks about Libraries
Jenni @ Conversaving discusses A Plan
Meghan @ Quiet in the Chaos discusses A Planner
Beth @ Weavings discusses the importance of Living Books
Tawnee @ Adventures in Homeschooling discusses Quiet Time
Karen @ My Harbor Lights discusses having a Sense of Humor
Amy @ Wildflower Ramblings discusses being Content with Her Role as a Mother
Kristi @ The Potter’s Hand Academy shares her "Absolute Favorite" homeschool company
Tara @ This Sweet Life

Menu Plan Monday: Week of May 23, 2011

Once again, last week had a bit of switching, other than that it went pretty well.  Did you know that beef roast reheated in a couple of cups of beef broth (made from bouillon cubes) goes great on a wrap with roasted red pepper hummus, lettuce, onion and avocado?  I love leftover Sundays.  I also have reorganized my refrigerator.  All the leftovers stay on the top shelf and it is amazing how little food has been wasted this month as opposed to previous months where leftovers got pushed back on the bottom shelf and got forgotten.

Here is this week's menu:

Monday: Pan Fried fish, baked (microwaved) potatoes and side salad

Tuesday: Tacos

Wednesday: Crock pot chicken with rice and gravy.  And a side salad

Thursday: Breakfast For Dinner Thursday: Pancakes buffet

Friday: Crock Pot Pork Chops in Cream of Mushroom Soup with rice and green beans

Saturday: Spaghetti and garlic bread with a side salad

Sunday: Leftovers

Don't forget to join my on Thursdays for Breakfast For Dinner Thursdays


Head on over to I'm An Organizing Junkie to check out other's menu plans.

Our First Week of School: Sept 6-10, 2010

And what a week it was!!  The girls are really excited to have school time.  One of my dilemmas is trying to challenge Tabitha while not boring Amelia, or overwhelming her.  The great thing about homeschooling- observing how things are going and being able to adjust as we go along.

I am so pleased that I got the playroom cleaned and organized.  The last time I had thoroughly organized it was back in January for our Pizza Party.  The discouraging thing about that party: after everyone left, it was clean, but no longer organized.  Then it got messier and messier as I got farther and farther along in my pregnancy.  After Hannah was born cleaning time was at a minimum.  However (and I am embarrassed to share these pictures, but hopefully by sharing I will force myself to remember not to let it happen again) I went from this:

to this:

in a couple of weeks time.  I just wanted to start this year off on a positive, organized note.  I was so thankful that Hannah took some good long naps in the afternoons so I could work on it.  And we bought some crates so I could split the toys up, to store some in the closet ready to change up every month.

Then we rearranged the dining room.  We moved the computer and desk into the living room.  The stereo had to go in the dining room and I finally got off my duff and cleaned my piles of papers and stuff that were on the tables so we could use them for displaying work and for our school table.  Which Tabitha is really excited about, knowing we have a place to call school.

I don't believe I have any before photos of the dining room.  Though all of our lesson pictures in the past were taken while the girls were working at the dining room table, and you usually got a glimpse of the cluttered computer desk and possibly the coffee table.  Now our coffee table holds some of our "work"/"activities" and I am not limited to the small stand I've been using.

Now, onto what we have been doing this week.

Our "curriculum" is going to consist of letter/sound of the week following the order found at
readinglessons.com, a free site I discovered.
"ReadingLessons.com is a free program that uses step-by-step lessons to help teachers and parents to teach children to read, write and spell."
I am following their order, but we are spending a week on each letter instead of 4 sounds a week.
I am also using letter of the week over at Brightly Beaming Resources. We have our poster on which we post our letter/sound of the week and 6 pictures starting with that sound.

We also have corresponding word/picture cards again (word on one side, picture on the other).  I actually use the letter of the week site as more of a guide than as a step by step curriculum.  I tend to find my own words, though I do appreciate her list of books, poems, foods among other ideas.  Just with our resources sometimes I have to substitute.
I have tweaked my schedule as we went along this week as what I had first planned got rearranged.  But I am hoping the following schedule will continue to work with the other lettters:

Monday: Introduce sound using phonemic exercises found at readinglessons.com.  Color, cut and collage our word card pictures onto a capital letter.

Our words are necklace, nuts, nest, nickel, nurse, Noah's Ark

During "circle time" I read one word card at a time (or have Tabitha read it if it is a 3-4 letter phonetic word)  and the girls find the picture card and place it on the poster.

Tuesday: Playgroup, so far no lessons scheduled this day.

Wednesday: Tactile letter activities.  During circle time the word card is read by myself or Tabitha.  This time however the girls go and get the picture and bring it to me.  Then I get the letter to use in our tactile letter basket.  The girls get to use a pipe cleaner to form the letter

we use our sandpaper letter

and our lower case build-a-letter I just found, created by Nicole over at Tired, Need Sleep.

Thursday: Continue the tactile focus.  First, during circle time I placed all the cards on the table.  Word cards in a row left to right and picture cards turned upside down in a row above them.  The girls pick a picture and try to find the word card that matches.  A little bit of a challenge here and Amelia really needs help, she prefers if I just show her the word card quickly so she can go hang the picture on the poster.  Then we make a textured letter.  This week we used green split peas as our color is green.

The girls had painted them the day before using 

blue and yellow paint to make green.

After they dried they helped me put the glue on and tried 

very hard not to get too sticky while placing the dried peas.

Friday: We make our letter craft on Fridays.  A craft that uses the shape of the letter somehow.  I may be using some ideas from Jolanthe over at Homeschool Creations.  Unfortunately I am going out of ABC order so she doesn't have crafts posted yet for 3 of my first 4 letters.  I actually thought I could use some ideas from  the book, Curious George Learns the Alphabet by H.A. Rey, we'll see.  Right now I have crafts planned for n, a, and m but I can't figure anything out for p (the order I am going in is n, a, p, m to name the letters/sounds for the first month).

We made an n necklace.  Here is where I drew the pattern

Then the girls glued the circle "beads" onto the necklace "string"

We will also review the sound of the letter with a sound activity game, not sure how else to describe it.  I am placing pieces of construction paper on which the letter has been written on the floor.  This week we also had 2 blank nothing cards.

As I say different words they will move to stand on a letter.

If the word doesn't contain a n they step on the nothing card.  This worked for beginning sound n, but when I tried 2 words ending in n we hit a wall.  So now I found something I need to work on.  It answered my question about whether Tabitha could do it.  As we add more letters I will place more than one letter down at a time so they have to choose the right letter.

I also printed out some worksheets from www.beginningreading.com.  There are many different ones to choose from; I chose alphabet set 1 (trace and write some letters) and alphabet set 2 (search, find, and circle the letters)

We will have a Bible Verse each week to go with our letter.  This week's is:
Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Genesis 6:8

Of course we've been reading the story of Noah all week out of different books.  We really like the Alice in Bibleland series.  I purchased them for my older children years ago and when they got older donated them to the church.  I hadn't planned on having anymore children after all.  Now I am borrowing them occasionally from there and from my friend who hosts playgroup.  I really like the accuracy in these stories.  I will have more of a review for the Noah's Ark Alice in Bibleland book come Saturday (or soon after) when I link up to What My Child is Reading over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

We are participating in Muffin Tin Monday this year and most of the time it will be planned around what we are doing that week while fitting it in with Muffin Tin Mom's theme.

On Wednesdays and Thursdays we will be focusing on our geography/postcard swap lesson.  This week's state was Delaware.  You can see what we did Wednesday here.  Below are the finished state pages for Delaware.  We finished coloring, cutting and gluing on the state outline, state bird, state flower and state seal.  And they traced the nickname of the state.  We will be creating a book of all the states in the union in the order they joined.

Unfortunately the computer decided to rotate 

a couple of pictures on me.

Friday's will be our bird book lessons.  I was going to use the bird listed at letteroftheweek.com, however I remembered I had a Wildlife Explorer binder (which I snagged up at a yard sale last year. It is a completed book and it would have cost a fortune to get all of those cards sent to us in the mail however often they would have sent them.  Now I am starting with a complete set, yay!).  So we will substitute birds, probably more often than not, that I can find in the binder.  For example, instead of nightingale we are learning about the Common Nighthawk for n.  These cards really have some interesting trivia and lovely pictures.

Like the United States of America book we are making, we can add information as the children get older.

I also plan on using the book Counting on Math: Activities for small hands and lively minds by Pam Schiller and Lynne Peterson.  I really like the way this book is set up.
Chapter 1: Exploration of Materials
Chapter 2: Spatial Relationships
Chapter 3: Classification
Chapter 4: Patterning
Chapter 5: One-to-One Correspondence
Chapter 6: Ordering
Chapter 7: Numeration 1-5, Plus 0
Chapter 8: Shapes
Chapter 9: Numeration 6-10
Chapter 10: Fractions
Chapter 11 Measurement
Chapter 12: Time and Money

I love how they explain the Developmental Sequence (from pages 13 and 14):
"Math builds on itself.  Children take what they learn from one concept and apply it to the next.  "

"When children are allowed to explore many objects,
they begin to recognize similarities and differences of objects.

When children can determine similarities and differences,
they can classify objects.

When children can classify objects,
they can see similarities and differences well enough to recognize patterns.

When children can recognize, copy, extend and create patterns,
they can arrange sets in a one-to-one relationship.

When children can match objects one to one,
they can compare sets to determine which have more and which have less.

When children can compare sets,
they can begin to look at the "manyness" of one set and develop number concepts."

Granted Tabitha is beyond some of this already, but I can move ahead with her if I feel it is necessary.  They have a schedule listed for each of 4 age groups to take you through a whole year.  I will probably follow the 4 year old schedule.

For our number activity this week I took masking tape, numbered 5 small pieces for each girl and put them on their fingers while we counted.

Then we put them on a tracing of their hands.  

Simple 1 to 1 correspondence activity.  Once again, something that wasn't planned but came to me late yesterday.

For science we will continue to do our little experiments/observations that life brings us. We have been linking up to Science Sunday over at Adventures in Mommydom, most recently with our tadpole and frog observations.  I also plan on using the book Science is Simple:Over 250 Activities for Preschoolers by Peggy Ashbrook when I can find ideas that go with our letter of the week.

I also created my very first sensory tub this week.  As we were doing n I made that my theme.  We had shredded newspaper, nickels, noodles and egg noodles. The girls seemed to enjoy it.

(I loved the way Tabitha was sitting)

Off our shelves, the most popular activities this week have been the dry pouring, which I changed from macaroni to green split peas, the tactile letter basket,

 the clothespin number match

(I printed this printable out back in February and I really can't remember where I found it. If you know where I got this from can you please let me know, I do NOT have time to go searching right now and I want to give credit where credit is due.),

Thanks to Kylie from Our Worldwide Classroom for reminding me where I found the count and clip cards.  You can find these and lots of other great printables at Nicole's blog, Tired, Need Sleep.

and Amelia is still really into putting the beads on the pipe cleaners.

To see what others are doing with their toddlers and preschoolers head on over to 1+1+1=1, Homeschool Creations  Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers 

And check out The Ultimate alphabet craft collection for unique craft ideas for every letter of the alphabet over at The Attached Mama