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!