The Homeschool Mother’s Journal #5

.In my life this week…

It’s been a busy week for me. We are starting our Summer Sunday school session this Sunday, along with planning the VBS at the end of the month. I just felt the need to go spruce up the Sunday school classroom and make it feel more relaxed, and allow more room for some creativity and games. We might not change it back to the more formal way the other teacher had it, I think the kids and I will truly love the look and feel of the new classroom I created.

I did host the first planning meeting for our VBS. We truly have it pretty easy, since we have a church from Texas that has agreed to come up and do all the hard work for us, we just have to do snacks, and spread the word to bring the children in. We got all the snacks figured out for the week, basically choosing to go with the easier snacks from their recommendations, and instead of going with the fancy drinks they suggested, such as flavored sparkling water, we chose to go with different colored Kool-aides, and punches. I know we down played a lot of what they figured would be cool for the kids, but we felt we needed to stay practical, since our church is still growing, and we do not have that many in the congregation to give.  

In our homeschool this week…

School around our home this week, was mostly play based. We took some time to just look and see how much Selena’s fine motor skills have improved, as well as her skill levels. There really wasn’t a lot of teaching moments, more assessing where to move from here, to get an idea of the direction to move in for next fall.

Places we’re going and people we’re seeing…

I’ve been trying to plan on bringing our daughter and grandson up from Arkansas for a visit. We would love to have her come up next month, but it might not happen until Thanksgiving (just some issues with baby’s dad) so the time is still up in the air. We have learned a huge lesson though in planning this, number one, they have decreased the number of busses that leave from where she lives to only one bus, which would give her a 6 hour lay over in Denver, but get this if we meet her some 3 hours away from our home, she has the choice of two busses, which would not have the long lay over. It doesn’t make any sense at all considering the route is the same either way and she would still go through this town, stop there, even if we did bring her clear on up here. Then we discovered that they now are increasing the rates by $100.00 for any type of weekend travel. Now if your head is spinning just from reading this, you will know how I have felt just trying to figure this all out.

My favorite thing this week was…

Just stepping back and watching and listening to how much Selena has grown in the last 6 months. I love these times when we just sit back and watch and observe the changes in her. While it is bittersweet knowing this means she is growing up, it truly is a time to embrace all the milestones she has achieved thus far in her life.

What’s working/not working for us…

Again, this week was just such an eye opener to Selena’s true learning style. She is so visual, and just wants to be so hands on. Forget all the worksheets, she really prefers when we can apply her learning to her life, or when she feels we are making her learning tools from simple inexpensive things here in the house.

Homeschool questions/thoughts I have…

The only question I really was struggling with was how I wanted to proceed with her learning how to write. I know she can write a lot of words, and knows how to make all her letters, she just needs something to put it all together. I do however, feel with recommendations from Ticia, and a few others we will try Handwriting Without Tears. When Selena and I visited their website, and she watched the videos, she just got so excited, it just seemed like what they were saying was clicking and making sense to her.

A photo, video, link, or quote to share…

Concentration at it’s best in our home!