My Fruitful Life: First 4 weeks of Kindergarten!

We are enjoying our kindergarten year. I have to be honest, the first day was HARD. I was almost ready to throw in the towel. However, I changed my attitude and found a good rhythm for us and things have been going much better since. I had to remind myself of the reasons why we wanted to homeschool in the first place. Mainly so that we can be more involved in our children's raising, be able to teach them about God, and to allow them to build close relationships with one another. In addition, we want the best education possible for each of them! With homeschooling there is so more flexibility and more time to hone in on skills we want to teach them and allow them time to explore things they are interested in.

We are really enjoying Sonlight Core A. We use it for language arts, most of our history, part of Bible, read-alouds, and science. We use Singapore for our math. Some of the crafts we do come from our curriculum, some come from the internet, and some I come up with. The other history book we're going through is called History for Little Pilgrims. It takes a child through history, starting with Creation and ends with today. Our Sonlight history this year explores World Cultures so we're getting to learn some things about the different cultures and people around the world. Our family loves to travel and I hope by studying so many cultures and places we'll be able to one day visit many of them and they'll have more meaning when we do. For handwriting we're using A Reason for Handwriting. So far our curriculum choices have been a good fit for us.

This year is plenty busy. Blue Rock has built a lot of things, he's had lots of time to paint, including painting with string and other mediums. He's learned how to make a paper boat and paper balloons and even taught his Sunday school class how to make paper boats! He figured out how to make a ball out of toilet paper and has created several and painted them and given them to various teachers as gifts. We've taken him on several field trips, the American Airlines Center, a self sufficient farm, and he has taken a lot of wood building classes. He has started his classes at his part-time school where he takes science, art, and Spanish, he's involved in two co-ops, is playing tennis, taking karate/gymnastics, and is going to start music classes next week with a good friend of his. We also planted a garden, which I'll do a separate post as it grows. Here is an overview of pictures from this year of some of the things he's done and places we've explored.