Homeschool Log stardate: 5-7-11 trough 5-14-11

This is the part of my blog where I basically rehearse what we've done for homeschooling.  Saturday (yes, we did educational things on Saturday) N and D watched Sesame Street Learning About Letters .  And N and I did the Get Your Groove on Mama  DVD and exercised along with that. So that's language arts and P.E..  Then she and I went to the park and she asked me why we exercise.  I explained that it was to help make us healthy and strong.  Does that count as health class for a 5 year old?

Monday we went to the park as usual, even though it was pretty hot, the kids had tons of fun playing!  N did a few pages from Mastering Basic Skills Kindergarten on patters, circles, stars, and counting.  N and D went over some vocabulary sight words and A just crawled around and tried to eat everything(he's 10 months old).


Thursday we had the preschool group from church.  This was the last regular lesson day, then we'll have a field day and then we're off for the summer.  N and D got to bring home their laminated sheet of their names to trace, they learned about the letter X, and ate twix candy! 

Free!

We helped some friends of ours move out a lot of their stuff and they gave us a bunch of free stuff.  In addition to a high chair and some hangers and some pegs to hang things on, we got all THIS!

Some of the workbooks have a few pages filled in, but it was all free so who cares?  I've found lately that there are a lot of people who buy their kids workbooks  to help them in school or whatever and then hardly or never use them.  The stuff off to the right is the flash cards for the your baby can read program, but we're not planning on using it with the baby, we're going to use it for helping our oldest child learn to sound things out and get to know the few sight words that don't follow the normal rules of phonics. 
I'm most excited about the write, slide and learn math! I think that N will really enjoy that!

Fort Worth Children's Museum

For homeschool today, we went to the Fort Worth Children's Museum (that's in Fort Worth!).  I personally thought it was overpriced for admission alone (let alone parking and the gas it took to get there and get detoured throughout Fort Worth because of traffic)  but the kids had a GREAT time and though they were completely exhausted after being there over 4 hours (we'd only planned on being there for about 2 to 2 and a half hours).  I must admit, the museum was INCREDIBLE!!
D Enjoyed the water courtyard the most, N liked the displays on momentum and aerodynamics the best.  The one on momentum involved standing on a circle and holding a pair of handle bars and them spinning on said circle, sticking out your booty, then bringing it in to go faster.  A little centrifugal force involved there too!  The one on aerodynamics had a large plastic tub with air blowing up from the bottom, and they had those cone shaped paper cups and scissors on a table next to it.  The idea is that you cut and or bend the cups in different ways to see which ways make it go up the tube faster or slower, and how much it topples around. The ones that were cut in a spiral shape were the ones that seemed to go up the fastest and the smoothest.
The kids also enjoyed the 4D theatre where we learned about how natural gas is formed and mined.
All and all, a pretty spiffy day!

Introduction

My name is Marilyn.  I have just started to home school my kids a little over a year ago.  My kids are all very young so they've never been public schooled.  My husband and I were both public schooled and weren't too impressed with it, so we looked for a different route.  This blog is a way for me to keep a record of our homeschooling so that I don't lose it and so that I don't get carried away with laziness and not do anything with it.
Some of our reasons for homeschooling are to make sure our kids are actually learning things and not being overwhelmed with "fluff."   So they learn to love learning rather than learn to pass a test that says they can endure more test prep.  To spend more time with them.  To give them the flexibility to more ahead when and where they can and not have to wait for their peers.  And to give them the individual attention to help them when they're struggling that they couldn't get in a classroom.
I hope you'll join me on my journey as I attempt to teach my kids!