Update

It has been a little over a month since we started our home school journey and I thought it was time for an update!

We have thoroughly enjoyed our first month, I don't think it could have gone any better!

The class that he is attending at the Church preschool has been the blessing that I had hoped that it would be. We were a little nervous about it since we had a change in teachers right before the school year began, however, our new teacher couldn't have been any better of a replacement. They are using the five in a row curriculum which is booked based and perfect for Brandon who loves books and reading. They do a new book every two weeks and they pull each subject from the book and do activities to go along with it, it's a really neat program. Also, they are learning about manners and respect and working as a team as his teacher has a rewards program where they collectively learn "cash" and when they reach $50 they get a special treat, this first month it was pizza. I love it though because they are earning this as a "team" so each person is accountable to all of his friends!

Teaching at home has been the most rewarding thing for me as a parent to watch him learning every day and being able to be the one to teach him! I was told that it's not unusual to change curriculum a few times the first year while trying to find the best match for your child. So far the only thing that I have changed is spanish, the program wasn't a good fit for us but we are using the internet and various printed materials and it is working wonderfully.

That is how our first month has gone, we are totally glad that we chose this path! We are heading to the mountains and Tweetsie Railroad this weekend and we are totally excited, I'll post about that when we are back!

Our first day of school!

Today was my baby boys first day of Kindergarten, at home! If you had asked me five years ago or maybe even last year about his first day of school, the last thing that I would have told you is that we would be homeschooling him. However, time changes things and I know in my heart that this is the path that God has chosen for our family.

We were all very excited that this day had finally arrived, I think that Brandon was probably the most excited of all of us, as he had been asking when his first day of school would be for about a month now. I, on the other hand, had a mix of emotions from "am I doing the right thing?" doubts, to "am I going to miss not sending him to school for his first day of Kindergarten" guilt , to the "I am going to be his teacher and get to be there for everything and watch him learn and grow" elation!

We started our day with coffee and of course chocolate milk and slowly transitioned into our school day. We did our bible lesson, filled out a 'kindergarten portfolio', did our math and writing lessons, read some books together and finally played a game of chutes and ladders. We followed our school day with a lunch/play date to celebrate our first day of school.

I would say that today was a great success and I pray that we have many more to come in our homeschooling journey! I leave with you a few pictures from our first day =)

Marbles Kids Museum

Fortunately living near the City we have access to many great museums! For right now, however, our favorite is Marbles Kids Museum. It's an awesome place and at only $5 a day for admission it truly can't be beat.

Marbles is a very interactive, fun place for small kids and grown kids to!

As you can see there are lots of things there for everyone! I am going to show you a few of the MANY pictures I took with Brandon in his favorite areas.

Brandons favorite exhibit right now is the pretend play area with the fire truck, ambulance and vet's office.

Here is he is dressed in full fire man gear!

Here he is dressed as a EMT checking out an xray:

Here he is giving this poor little goat a shot and then placing him in the crate:

Making pizza for Daddy!

Silly boy!

Looking out over the City!

Okay, so I realize I am a little biased but isn't he the cutest hockey player, ever?

Woodworking with Daddy:

Outdoor water "table" he enjoyed making the ducks race down to the end:

I am hoping to make this one of our regular field trips once we start our school year, I feel like it's a great educational experience as well as a lot of fun for the kiddos!

Curriculum Choices!

This was probably the absolute hardest part of preparing to home school! I have spent hours reading blogs, surfing home schooling websites and reading manuals trying to figure out the "perfect" curriculum. What I found out is that there is NO perfect curriculum, so I set out on my search for what would work well for our family!

Here is what we will be using this year in addition to the Five In a Row Curriculum that he will learn in his home school class at school!

First things first is our Bible curriculum, I chose a simple book that has pictures that he can color each day that have a different bible story on them.




Reading was probably the hardest thing for me because Brandon has been reading for well over a year and has no problems with sounding out most words, however, I decided to do a phonics review with him to make sure that he has the basic rules down! So, our choice here was Explode the Code:



Writing, we decided to use A Reason for Handwriting




Math, Horizons Math. This was not a hard choice, once I looked through it I knew it would be a great match for us!



And last but certainly not least (especially not according to my child!!) is Spanish, this is a special interest area for B and he's super excited about "Spanish Fridays". I chose to do Spanish only on Fridays because our curriculum only includes 33 lessons!

Organizing our school!

I have spent the better part of the past month, working and reworking my curriculum choices and organization for our home school. I have finally settled on the curriculum we will use and the way I like things organized (well for now anyway!) I would like to share with you through pictures what I have come up with.


First we need a student! =)



This is my crate to help me keep things together! I have a hanging folder for each subject that holds the teachers manuals, workbooks and anything else that I may have printed off for each subject. I also have both of my favorite home school resource books (more about those later) and our notebooks! Also, my lesson planning book is in there to!



This is where all of our other supplies are held. The top 3 drawer container will hold the materials for the three days a week that we'll school at home and the larger container holds all of our other materials!





Since we are not going to have a dedicated school room for now, I decided to use small easels to hold our small dry erase boards so that we can move them from room to room. This was also a pretty cheap way to go too! I bought the easels for under $2 each and the dry erase boards for around $2-5, since we have several.




The easels also worked well on our calendar that I picked up from the Target dollar section!!

Our new adventure..

It's been a long time since I have updated this blog, however that is all about to change! We have decided as a family after much prayer and thought, that we feel the best course of education for our little guy is to home school him! He is probably more excited than I am about it and I'm pretty darn excited!

We will be homeschooling 3 days a week at home and the other 2 days he will attend a home school class at the Church preschool that he attended. We are pretty excited about the class as he will have his same teacher and two of his fellow classmates from preschool will be with him as well!

I will be blogging at least weekly about all of the new, fun and exciting things that we are learning. I hope through this experience I can give some ideas and receive some in exchange! My hope is that you will follow us on this journey..

Proverbs 22:6 says it best.. "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."

Using Coupons

Sooo I love the idea of coupons and ideally I'd like to use them all of the time, but the reality is that I use them on and off and then about half the time.. I made a trip to Harris Teeter today, they are doing their super doubles where they double any coupon up to $1.98. So, the boy and I were sitting around and I was reading about all of the free or almost free things that I could be getting today and jumped in the car and off we went.

I ended up with

6 boxes of green giant vegetables for $3
4 boxes of Betty Crocker potatoes for $2
4 cans of Chunky soup for $3
2 packs of Dannons kids yogurts for $free
2 packs of Danonino kids yogurt for $1.70
2 bags of friskies cat food for $4
2 bags of friskies cat treats for $free
2 bags of Yoplait smoothies for $1.00
1 pack of Polly string cheese for $2.79
2 packs of Pillsbury Sweet Moments for $3
2 packs of Wholly Guacamole for $2
2 boxes of Toaster Strudels for $4.50

Total of $27 + Tax

Not too bad!

Here is the haul:

Preschool!

I haven't updated in a while (Imagine that!)

We had a pretty uneventful summer, though we bought a swimming pool and that was tons of fun! We haven't had our vacation yet, but will next week so be on the lookout for that post!

However, Mr Brandon officially left the nest of Grandma and Mommy (for 3 half days a week anyway) and started Preschool. The first day was full of tears from Mama and sheer joy and excitement from Brandon!

My first tears started over our conversation in the van on the way there:

Brandon - Mama, are you going to miss me?
Me - Of course I'm going to miss you
Brandon - It's okay Mama I'll be back in a little while

Who knew the boy would have to comfort the Mama on this big day in both of our lives..

It's been a week since that first day and the boy loves it more and more every day I think. He comes home singing songs and telling me about things that happened, this amazes me since not quite 2yrs ago my little boy couldn't say 10 words and we were going through the hell that is known as "Evaluations".. Speaking of, he's come so far in that 2yrs that his speech therapist doesn't think she'll need to see him much longer so we'll be having another evaluation soon and I believe that this one will be met with happy tears instead of frustrated ones!

Here are a few pictures of his first day of school:

Brandons 4th Birthday

Brandon turned four on December 6th, where in the world does the time go!! We did our usual birthday party at the Church Fellowship Hall of my Moms Church and had hot dogs, chips and cake. We got him a Leapster2 which has been a huge hit and Grandma got him the "crash cage" for his monster jams that he had been begging for forever! Here are a few pictures from the festivities!

Catching Up (Yet again!)

So I am back to catching up (yet again!) on here! It has been a long while since I posted on here and a lot and not a lot has happened in that time frame.

Brandon turned 4 and is finally talking (almost) like he should be. He is still learning how to put sentences that make complete sense together, but for the most part we're right on track! In October we took a short family vacation to the beach and although it rained on us at the beach, we enjoyed the time away.

I am still working at the bank, but I am trying to get in at the new Emergency Room that opened near our house doing patient registration, I've had my first interview and that went well so I'm hoping and praying that I hear back on that as soon as possible..

Here are some pictures of the beach trip!

Fears!

I received an email a couple of months ago about 3 and a half year olds and fears and interestingly enough the fears started rolling in about that time.. He's now scared of Mudcats Games, Big Movies, Fireworks and Dogs and a few other things I'm probably not thinking about at the moment.

The Mudcats game all I can figure is that the fireworks show afterwards scared him, because he thoroughly enjoyed the game up until then..

Big Movies, that's an interesting one, we have been to see three or four movies since he was about 2. White Oak theatre offers two free movies every Tuesday and Wednesday during the summer, we decided to go and see Horton Hears a Who a couple of weeeks ago. We got in the theatre, got our popcorn and went to walk into see the movie and it was completely dark except for the running lights and he froze and started to scream. I waited a while to see if maybe he would want to stay once the movie actually started and he seemed a bit interested as we were standing in the outside aisle until the elephent screamed out, needless to say we got in our car and headed home!!

Fireworks, let me just tell you that you probably don't want to learn DURING a fireworks show that your child is scared of fireworks, I do believe the noise in our truck was louder than the actual fireworks!!

Dogs, this one happened when our friends little puppy innocently jumped on him, licked him and grabbed his hat off his head and ran. Now when we go around dogs, he promptly asks the owners to "Put doggy in fence" lol

He does not mind a bit letting you know that he's scared, he will say NO big movie, mudcat games or fireworks!! He also doesn't want any dog (2lbs or 100lbs) anywhere near him!

I hope, hope, hope that this is just a phase and that he doesn't continue to add to this list of fears... I have heard from a few reliable sources though that Daddy was a scaredy cat as a kid too ;)

Pullen Park

It's so cool to take Brandon to Pullen Park and for him to ride on the same rides that I did 20 some odd years ago, nostalgic much? He's been a few times now and refers to it as "the big park" and he really enjoys the "little" train and the "little" boats a lot. Frankie had not been to Pullen Park since our dating years (8+ years ago) and I think he enjoyed it as much as Brandon did, we took him this past Saturday and he rode the train (twice), the little boats and he "almost" rode the carosel (yea we stood in line til it started and he says "no ride horse, momma") Here are some pictures:

On the way there with his best buddy Curious George!

View from the train ride:

On the little boats:

Supercala...what?!?

During the summer Grandma and Brandon have a few visitors a/k/a as cousins and friends that are out of school for the summer. These friends are taking major advantage of his booming vocabulary right now and I came home one day and my "just started talking" three and a half year old child says to me "Super Cala Fraga Listic Expi Ali Docious" and he was SO proud of himself, it's SUPER cute! I made a video of it of course!!

Go Carts!

Daddy has introduced Brandon to riding go carts! We first took him on our vacation week to Adventure Landing and let him ride, he fell in love! Mommy wasn't so sure he would like it with all the noise and stuff but he let me know right quickly that he LOVED it!! We have been back two more times since our first visit the first week of June and he begs to go on a regular basis. Here are a few pictures of the times that he has been: