Our first year of homeschool is complete!

We finished Pre-K 4 today! We are planning to take the rest of this month and July off to just read a little and play a lot!

Thomas started out knowing very little and now my boy is reading and even writing in cursive! I am so proud of him.

I am thankful to have had this year to explore homeschooling without a lot of formality, rules or regulations. We took almost a full year to complete the school year. There were several "life happens" weeks where things were stressful for one reason or another and we just chose to table homeschooling for a while (knowing we had plenty of time to complete our work) and other days when we just didn't feel like homeschooling so we didn't.

The beauty of homeschooling is that we are not ruled by the "attendance lady" and don't have to worry about excused or unexcused absences. If one of us was having a bad day, we could just not do school. I hated the days when I knew I was setting one of my older kids up for a bad day at school by sending them because it would have been an unexcused absence. Who wants to get a ticket for truancy? Ugh...

The scary part of homeschooling is that if you aren't too careful, you can fall behind and catching up could be a real bear. I have seen this with a friend...life happened, they fell behind in school and catching up was exhausting. Thankfully I am pretty disciplined in general.

All in all this has been such an amazing year. I have loved spending the morning with Thomas and KK teaching them everything from their ABC's to stories from the Bible. Who would have thought that when reading about Abraham taking Isaac up to sacrifice him that I would get choked up just thinking about the horror Abraham must have felt and wondering if I could do that with Thomas? Or when teaching the kids about Mary washing his feet with the perfume from her alabaster box I could sing CeCe Winan's song "Alabaster Box" to them and they could understand (at their age level) what that song meant?

I am so thankful and feel so blessed to be a part of their journey through education...God has blessed me, my gratitude runs deep.

Next year I will be homeschooling BOTH Thomas and KK. I will definitely have to be more disciplined and focused but I KNOW that I will be doubly blessed!

Thanks for reading...until August! ♥

Thinking about next year...

Blogging has taken a back seat to "life" lately though I plan to try and keep up with it. Its history for the kids and who knows...maybe something I say will be profound. :)

I will be ordering next years curriculum on Tuesday. I am exciting to see what Kindergarten holds for Thomas' little mind and if I am honest, a little apprehensive about teaching Kaleah. My sweet baby gets anxious when it comes to "new" things and when she gets stressed, she shuts down. Where I am sure everything will be fine (it is only PreK4 after all), it will be different teaching both kids and not just Thomas.

This year was our trial run and Charles and I have spent a great deal of time talking about homeschool vs public school (or charter school) and we both agree that for our kids, homeschooling is the way to go. Homeschool isn't for everyone but it is for us.

My plan is to hunker down and stay on schedule...staying disciplined is harder than it looks especially when it is beautiful outside! Yet...I have the two cutest students on the planet who deserve a teacher that will do her very best. I am looking forward to it!

I took a little break from blogging about homeschool because we got just plain busy and I was trying out one thing or another to see what worked best for our family and well...I forgot all about it. There you have it. :)

The good news is that everything is going well. Thomas is reading three letter words, he had a hard time with his blends "hu..le..fi" etc but once he got it, there was no stopping him. Handwriting frustrates him and I am not sure why. We don't stress over it as he is only in PreK4, we have plenty of time to get it right.

As I work with Thomas on his daily work, KK happily colors. She stays very focused on her color page, you would think she was writing a thesis or something. It it adorable.

The kids always enjoy Bible time...many times I will look up from reading their story to see them holding hands as they listen. Thomas likes to talk about the people in the pictures (Abeka has a great Bible program) and KK turns every Bible person into a princess or "mer-mate".

What I have learned that for the Kibbles, we need to stay in a routine. Doubling up one day...taking a few days off for whatever reason is a nice option to have but we just function better if we plan our days around homeschooling than homeschooling around our days. There will be days when we have to make exceptions but Thomas just has better days when we stay on a regular routine so we are going to work hard to make that happen.

Homeschool parents, I would love to hear about your favorite math program. Abeka math bores us silly...we are on lesson 81 and only on the number eleven. There are only so many ways to make numbers exciting. Thomas can count to 100 and can identify numbers in the 20's and 30's by site. Should I just buy 1st grade math instead of Kindergarten next year?

I continue to love homeschooling...it is so wonderful to watch my little ones minds work. I can see why teachers love what they do.