Because How We Do It Is Subject To Change

Ya'll - homeschooling has taught me two things.  1. How brilliant my kid is.  2. How undisciplined I am without a plan.  It is so easy to just skip school on days when we have other stuff going on.  I need to get over that! Fortunately she loves doing her school work so it isn't too hard to stay on track.  So since we are about mid-year, I figured it would be a good time to update what we are doing, what works and what hasn't.

We are still doing the assignments written out in the spiral notebook.  The core of our classes come from Allinonehomeschool.com (Level 1 and Year 2 Level L).  We do their History, Science, Reading (although we bought the book to do that off the computer), PE, Art, English/Writing.  We are supplementing with free McGraw-Hill workbooks I found online for Grammer, Spelling and Practice.  We are also using Mammoth Math instead of their math program.  It is working well.

At the beginning of every week I set up five days for Grace in another binder.  It gives her all the papers she needs for the day in a divider tab so she doesn't have to go hunting for everything individually.  It takes me about 10 minutes on Sundays to swap the old stuff out, file it and get the new stuff in there.

I quickly determined that we were keeping entirely too much paper.  So now we slide all our math, grammer and spelling worksheets into page protectors.  She uses a fine tip dry erase marker to complete the pages and I wipe them clean after I check them.  It is working really well and makes it so much easier stay on top of all the papers.  Additional plus side - less copies to print for Abi!

Abi was doing the Getting Ready Level 1, also on AllInOneHomeschool.com - we were just getting bored with it.  So I found an awesome alphabet pack download for $15 at CraftyClassroom.com.  We use the videos and games from All In One but are using the worksheets from Crafty Classroom.  It has been a good change of pace and usually after she completes the ones I "assign" her for each day she comes back and asks to do more papers out of the stack.  They give you about 25 pages per letter so she has plenty to do.

I feel like it is going pretty smoothly - again, my focus and other things going on in life being our biggest hurdle but overall I can't complain!