Sunday, August 7, 2011

Getting Ready

I've been thinking a lot about Abigail and school lately. A lot of kids her age will be starting some form of preschool in the fall. I never really considered signing her up. You see, we still haven't decided whether we will home-school or not.

For those of you who may not know, Jonathan and his brothers were all home-schooled through high school. I never really would have considered it as a serious option for our girls if this hadn't been the case. Jonathan is super supportive and doesn't expect our default schooling of choice to be home school, but he does expect me to prayerfully consider and be open to it (which is totally reasonable!).

So, as part of OUR prayerful consideration, we have decided to home-school Abigail for preschool as sort of a trial run. As I get ready for our time together I get really excited! Other times I am overwhelmed.

We'll see how it goes though and hopefully we can share a bit of what we learn with you!
A friend of mine pointed me to a homeschooling website called 1+1+1=1. We'll be using her Raising Rock Stars Preschool materials. She offers so many free printables and also makes them available for quick download for a nominal fee. Here are some of the preparations we've been making the past week or so:

I really liked the idea of a calendar, I modeled ours after this one on the 1+1+1 website. We're not quite finished with it. I need to add a few pockets and also some temperature stick-ups and clothing stick-ups (hot hot/cold is it? and what should I wear in this weather?).

I also put together a little binder to hold Abigail's work and a binder for me to hold all my teacher stuff (all of the printouts came from 1+1+1=1).

Abigail keeps talking about school. I think she's looking forward to the next week or so being over so we can get started!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good luck! My husband was homeschooled as well, until he got to high school and his mom had difficulty keeping up with him in math and science. He loved it, and from the start we wanted to either homeschool or private school our kids (I went to public school all the way, and he went to public school in high school--we don't want to subject our kids to that).

I'm homeschooling my girls. We'll be going with Sonlight, which has some fun preschool books if you need ideas. And My Father's World has fun sets of toddler and preschool toys that give kids practice with colors, shapes, fine motor skills, problem-solving, etc.

When she's old enough, there's also "All About Reading," which is a fun program. The only level that's out now does pre-reading skills, mostly letter names/sounds, rhyming, separating the first sound from a word, etc. It comes with a cute zebra puppet. I can't wait until the next level comes out this fall.

Good luck, and have fun!