Disorganize to Organize

I should have taken pictures of the process, but let's just say that what I was looking at was beyond scary. Anyway, the last few weeks, we've been preparing our house for our new venture into homeschooling. I did most of it on my own, because the hubby works so much (and football practice for the boys runs a bit late for us) he's only home long enough to eat dinner, shower, and sleep.

I started in the garage, and cleaned off our old kitchen table. Our house is really small, so the kids have been eating on a small children's table, and us adult folk have been using t.v. trays. The little table we've been using for the kids is too small for them to spread out and work on, so I had to bring out the big one. Our house and garage have been a huge mess the last few weeks because of all this. Anyway, I put the big table in my living room (which stood there for about a week and a half), then cleared out the corner that my sewing stuff is in, and put both the little and big table in the corner.

Back in the garage, I had to find a place for all the stuff I cleared off the big table, find places for all of my sewing stuff (machines, fabric, and notions), and make room for all of our school supplies and books (2 shelving units worth). I cleared out a lot of things we no longer need, stuff that broke when the dogs got in there, old strollers, so there was lots of trash.

Today, one of our boxes from Abeka (the books we chose for mostly everything this year) came, and the other is due in tomorrow. Once I get all the books together, I'll have to go through and make our lesson plans. I'm ordering math mammoth through a co-op, so we won't be doing math for another few weeks (until I get the CD in, and have copies made for the boys). I also ordered superstar speech for Orion (he has a diagnosed speech delay and articulation issues), and am hoping this helps us to help him.

I'm hoping to start school next week, since we already have our first field trip planned for the week after. The rest of this week though, will be spent cleaning the rest of the garage, getting our house into order, and meeting up with our homeschool group. Ice cream social, here we come!

Pre-k

I found a box full of stuff from my days as a preschool teacher. I sorted it all out, paper clipped it, and now it's sitting... waiting for me to photocopy it into a consumable workbook for my Bunny. I offered to make copies for my friends children also, so hopefully they see these pictures and let me know what they want copies of.


This group is full of seasonal/holiday sheets. Everything from winter, Easter, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, Father's Day, to St. Patrick's Day and beyond. Some are bag puppet pieces, coloring pages, activities, etc.

This group is what I like to call pre-math. It has sheets like bigger and smaller, matching, line correspondence, opposites, more and less, and same size.


This group is the different shapes, and a variety of exercises to go along with them.

This group is a great place to start when your just beginning with a little one who hasn't gotten in much pencil or scissor practice (great for fine motor skills). These are just tracing pages, that have straight lines, wavy lines, zig zag lines, and exercises to practice the different lines. There's also pages with different lines to practice cutting.


These are just random animal and insect pages. There's a butterfly craft using an egg carton, an animal mask, a bird bag puppet, and a few others.


This group is all the letters of the alphabet (a few different sheets per letter), and some exercises to work on them.


This is the last group which is numbers 1-10 (a few different sheets per number), and some exercises to practice them.

So that's all my consumable pre-k stuff, that I've acquired over the years. I have more workbooks and such, but their geared for an older level, so I'll save those for supplementing Bunny's kindergarten year :)

Homeschool

After much thought and deliberation, I've decided to file my own private school affidavit (psa for short). I looked into our options, and we were going to go with a resource center (which files it's own psa, and would have kept our records for us), but the cost was $375. I know that's not unreasonable, but after looking at different curriculum's, I couldn't justify the cost. For a little extra effort on my part, I can keep my own records for free, and by filing my own psa I now have more freedom on what I want to teach my kids.
I finally decided on which books I want for the boys for the year, and I'm hoping to acquire a few more throughout the year to see what fits us best. Were going with math mammoth for math (for now), Abeka for most everything else, and growing with grammar and spelling as a complimentary aid. I'm hoping to toss in either singapore math, or saxon math to mix with our math mammoth. Orion will also be using superstar speech, to help with his speech delay and articulation issues. Of course these will be our main books, and I'll be using other books and aids as supplements, like Global Wonders for geography. Olivia will use a big combination of preschool books and consumables that I collected through my time teaching preschool. I still have to sort through them and see what will fit her learning style, but I have a ton of manipulative's to help her along also.

I'm almost done setting up our homeschool area of the house, and it's going to change the whole structure of our house, since it's so small. I'm giving up my whole sewing corner to give the kids an area without distractions, and I cleared out an area and a shelving unit for all of our supplies. I think I still need another shelving unit though, for more books.... so it looks like I'll be putting away some of my fabric to make room for that. It's all going to be worth it though, because over the past few months I've noticed how much happier my kids are when their with me. I let them be themselves, and it's working for us.

Football.... Go get some!

Raymond and Orion started football. I'm nervous and scared at the same time. I'm not an athletic person by any means, don't understand any sport, and am petrified of my boys hurting themselves. I'm trying so hard to be a good sport about this, but well.... it's terrifying! I go back day after day (5 days a week), drop the boys off at the park (with the in laws), pick the husband up at work, drive back to the park, we stay there till about 8:30 p.m, and are home about 9 p.m. Our days are long!

Raymond does well in practice, doesn't complain or cry (which is my Babe's core personality trait lol), and is even excited to go back day after day. Orion.... meh, not so much. Orion messes around a lot during practice, and we think it's because it's flag football, and not the tackle kind his brother is playing. Maybe next year he'll take more of an interest when it's his turn for tackle. Orion's taken more hits falling off the bleachers (note to other parents: cleats have no grip on metal bleachers) than he has playing football, that reminds me that I need to keep that kid far away from the bleachers from now on. He is making friends though, and that makes me smile :)


Raymond gets to wear lots of pads to practice, and looks so adorable in his little get-up. All the pictures I have are of Raymond, because well.... if I post any of Orion, you'll see him standing around, playing in the dirt, flipping his jersey up, and yeah... you get the picture! I'm hoping we'll get tons of pics of Orion once the games start, cross your fingers!

Travel town

Today we went to a birthday party at Ttravel Town in Griffith Park. It was sooo hot, but we had tons of fun. I was kind of on edge while we there, because there were so many bees, and Orion is allergic. Thankfully, I brought our little medi kit, complete with his epi pen. The kids had a blast doing birthday things (hitting the pinata, singing, playing games, and of course eating cake), and we had a blast walking around and looking at all the trains.It's crazy how huge they are, and you never really notice... until your standing next to a wheel bigger than you are!


And how we've lived in the area all our lives, been to Griffith Park every year since our kids were born (to see the christmas lights), and have never been to Travel Town.


So we piled into all the trains we were allowed in, and took tons of pictures! Well, mostly Daddy did, because I wore a dress and coming down from the trains would have made Travel Town X-rated lol.
The whole birthday party took the train ride together, too.


And that made all the kids happy!


I didn't want to post actual pictures of the party, because there were other children besides my own in them, and I just felt weird about that. The kids are already excited to go back, hopefully with some educational material in hand so we can really get the full effect of it all!