We've discoverd...LAPBOOKS!!

It never fails that I go out and get some new homeschool curriculum and think it's going to work out awesomely but after like 1-2 weeks I'm bored! I had a bit of a meltdown and questioned if I should even be homeschooling! The thought of sending my kids to public school terrifies me and christian private school is expensive and still would expose them to things that I don't want them to be exposed to so yes, homeschooling is what I'm supposed to be doing. I was still faced with the dilemma of being bored with the way we were doing it but needing to help my hubby feel comfortable with everything so I reached out to my fellow homeschool moms and asked for ideas. Several of them mentioned lapbooking so I dug in and figured I'd research it and go from there. Let me tell you, I am totally hooked and Keegan is LOVING it! We still do math & english out of our workbooks but we've changed how we're going to do everything else. Hubby & I asked Keegan what he wanted to learn about and he said space. My friend Tiffany pointed me to an awesome website that happened to have a space lapbook section so I printed off tons of pages and away we went! Keegan is a lot like me. He likes hands-on crafts and being able to show off his work! LOL This solves the problem with my hubby because he's able to see with his own eyes the things Keegan is learning and some of what we do during our homeschool time! It's like educational scrapbooking! AWESOME! So this is what we did day one on our lapbook. Gotta love that Keegan is all boy with his plastic toy gun! LOL

First day of school!

Well, yesterday kicked off our homeschool year! I made him this sign and hung streamers around the living room/dining room areas, just to give it a more festive feel. We started the day by surprising Keegan and taking him out for donuts and chocolate milk at our local bakery. He was so excited when we pulled up! I'm bummed that I spaced taking a picture of it but it was really fun for all of us to sit around the table munching on YUMMY donuts and sippin our chocolate! Then off daddy went to work and the kids & I headed home to get started. Mondays I have bible study from 12-2pm so I was really hoping we'd get all 6 subjects done by the time we had to leave and to my pleasant surprise Keegan finished all his work by 11:15am!! That's only 2 hours and 15 minutes!! Since he did so well and finished up so early I decided to take the kids out to McDonalds for lunch as a special treat before bible study!

So yeah, a pretty awesome first day of school! Keegan was able to come home and do his chores quickly and spend a few hours playing with his friends across the street and we ended the day with PIZZA! :) To top things off, our friend Dave is helping make Axe Cop episodes for our friend Ethan (he and his brother created the comic) and asked if Keegan would like to be one of the voices on this next episode which he was seriously stoked about! What a great first day of school!

On a side note, I'm not sure if you guys were aware of this or not but, I have the WORLD'S best and most amazing husband!! Yep, I do! I am so honored by that fact! :) Earlier this summer my hubby made a skate ramp for the kids and we've had a few slabs of leftover wood in our backyard. Sunday afternoon my hubby used that wood to make a super cool shield for Keegan!! We bought the dagger earlier that day and my hubby used his airbrush gun to paint it all nice. The neighbor kids thought the shield was so cool that they asked if Josh could make them one too but we didn't have enough wood! I am so excited for my kids to have such an awesome hands-on kind of dad! Everyday he plays with them and shows them how loved and special they are to him and he's always doing special things for them and he just blows me away on a daily basis! I didn't have much of a dad growing up so I am very thankful and excited that I am married to such an amazing man & father!!!!

A new chapter...

Well, tomorrow starts off another year of homeschooling! YAY!! When I step back and look at my life it still amazes me that I'm a homeschooling mom and this will be our 4th year of homeschooling! When my son Keegan was 4 years old I was working full time as a CNA/unit secretary at our local hospital. I worked 3-11:30pm so that he wouldn't have to be in daycare very much and this meant that if he was going to attend a preschool, that would have meant less time for me to spend with him and more time of him being sent off to be cared for and taught by people that weren't my husband or I. The thought of that seriously made me sick. I opted to buy the same curriculum that his daycare used for their preschool program and started working on it at home during the mornings before I went to work. The longer I did it the more set I became on homeschooling. Before that I was so anti-homeschooling! I thought homeschooled kids were weird and that they'd turn out to be weird adults, unable to really socialize with the rest of the normal world. LOL It seriously cracks me up to think back to those days. I quickly came to realize that even kids sent off to public school could turn out to be outcasts or anti-social people, not able to really function in the real world. I'll skip all the other points of why I choose to homeschool and we'll just say that it's what the Lord placed on my heart and He made it VERY clear that I was to homeschool! So yeah, that was 4 years ago! We're still learning a lot as we go along. I'm learning what works best for Keegan and what works best for me and this year brings a whole new challenge...a younger sister full-on into her terrible-two's! LOL It's definitely going to be hard trying to balance keeping Tatym entertained and being able to help Keegan with his daily school work. This year I'm vowing to get up every morning before the rest of the family, get showered and dressed and ready for the day and sit down for some prayer & quiet time with the Lord before the rest of the family wakes up. Ideally I'd love to be getting up around 5:30am but I have a really hard time getting up earlier than 7am so it will take me awhile to build up to it. I'll be happy with 6am! :) This past week I managed to get up at 6:40 two mornings in a row! HOT DANG, that's awesome for me! LOL

Tomorrow we start a new tradition for the first day of school: we're going out for donuts and chocolate milk at the new bakery in our town! Keegan doesn't know about it yet but he does know that we've got something special planned and he's excited and anxious to find out what it is!

Tomorrow begins my new journey in scheduling our days more. Since I started homeschooling Keegan a year early (due to his birthday falling in November he missed the cut-off for starting school but since he could already read and knew so much we opted to go ahead and start kindergarten early) I used it as an excuse to be more relaxed with his schoolwork. I was lazy! So this year we're buckling down and getting serious! I also know that for both my son, and I, we do better with structure. We do good when we know what the plan is and have a schedule of what to do during the day.

So as I get ready to tuck my kids into bed tonight and say our prayers, I'm going to be saying a special prayer for the Lord to help us adapt to our new schedule and for Keegan to have a happy heart about his school work, for me to be more patient and understanding, for us to keep pretty close to the schedule (allowing God to still do as He wants with us day-to-day), for Tatym to not terrorize her brother while he's doing his work (LOL) and for this year to go smoothly! Here's to a new chapter in our lives! Thank you Lord for this amazing blessing you have given me, to be a homeschooling mom to two amazing and wonderful children and a stepmom to another homeschooled young man! Bless our school year Lord, we do it all for YOU!

Oobleck

If you've never made Oobleck, you are sadly missing out on some FUN! :) To celebrate Dr. Seuss' birthday (March 2nd) I decided to make some Oobleck (read the book Bartholemew and the Oobleck) with my Prek/K homeschool co-op kiddos. They not only liked it...they LOVED it! All the squeals and ohhhhs and aaahhhhs and eewwwwws were priceless! Since it's a gray, wet and dreary day here on the Oregon Coast, my son, Keegan and I decided to make a batch.

All you need is 2 cups of Cornstarch (you can get a Walmart brand for $0.88), around 1 cup of water (you don't want it too watery so add it slowly because you might not need the whole cup) and some food coloring to make it look more interesting!


This stuff is awesome! When you apply pressure it acts as a solid. Try punching it, poking it, etc. It gets hard. Now try gently pushing your hand into it or letting it slide off your hand...it's like liquid! FUN, huh?! Keegan and I played in it for a LONG time and plan on playing with it when my hubby gets home! Keegan asked if we could make it with our Tiger Cubs at the next den meeting! Oh, and this stuff is SUPER easy to clean up! If it dries on your hand or on the counter, it flakes right off or just use water and it rinses right off! Can't beat that! HAVE FUN!

Yay, co-op is starting again!

Our homeschool co-op is starting the newest semester next Friday and being the procrastinator that I am, I'm just now getting my lesson plans together. I've had this awesome preschool curriculum from Funshine Express since 2007 and it's come in handy for my PreK/K class. The picture above is of some of the games that came with the curriculum that I'm coloring and cutting out and getting ready for my preschoolers. If you are looking for PreK curriculum, definitely check out Funshine Express. I definitely plan on ordering another year of curriculum from them once Tatym turns 3. I guess now they even have a curriculum for babies but that's not for me! :) That seems a little nuts to me to buy school curriculum for a baby but to each his own and whatever floats your boat, right?! LOL Anyways, I'm super super super excited to be starting co-op again!!!!