A Grand Adventure Begins

Tomorrow morning, if all goes according to plan, we will begin our journey in homeschooling. I spent an hour last night going over books and making a bit of a lesson plan and having Carla copy worksheets. I know, I know...the best laid plans of mice and men...but as I just wrote on the SecHS forums, as a newbie I feel some comfort in having a plan.

I'm going to start with ELA from LLAL (the Red Book for Grade 2). This course is nice in that it's an all-in-one ELA curriculum and nicely broken down into days. It even has us cutting out stuff on the first day so that should be fun for Mitchell. All my boys love to cut stuff up.

Next up is Science. We'll be studying life cycles first with Evan-Moor's Daily Science and Read and Understand Science. I've also got some pages marked in the Giant Science Resource Book and Usborne encyclopedia to fit in with the first two exercises.

I'm going to finish the day with Math from our Miquon books. This is a very hands-on course. I think Mitchell is good at math, but lacks patience staring at books and worksheets. Miquon has the Cuisenaire rods to play with so maybe that will help him visualize problems better, plus I'm going to start a little back into the Grade 1 stuff. It's worth a try anyway.

Matthew and Michael will be starting with coloring some alphabet worksheets. We'll start with "A" tomorrow and do some A words on the whiteboard. I also plan to let them play with the Cuisenaire rods. I hope to get some basic math in with them soon. Matthew tends to be several months behind Michael developmentally (both physically and academically) despite them being twins so it will be a learning experience for me as well as them this school year just trying to find what works for them.

I'm getting excited about starting our homeschooling and the boys are, too. They've been asking for a while when we can start and that day is almost here! Yay!