homeschooling adventures (year 3)

It's hard to believe we've finished our THIRD year of homeschool. How the time flies! Technically we just completed our Senior Kindergarten (SK) year, but we ended up doing a lot of grade one work. We still did three mornings (truthfully, sometimes it ends up being afternoons!) a week, which allowed us to go to playgroup one morning, and do errands/grocery shopping another morning. 

Here's how we structured our mornings this year:

Morning Meeting (15 minutes)

Calendar / Day Count 

Weather chart / Temperature

Bible Memory Work 

Morning Message

Working With Words (20 minutes)

1. Sight Word (aka "popcorn words" because they pop up everywhere in our reading!) practice - Monday: chant and cheer for the 5 new words

-Tuesday/Thursday: sight word practice games like bingo, go fish, read my mind, the stick game... from The Teacher's Guide to Four Blocks book.

2. Phonemic Awareness - using word-building lessons from Systematic, Sequential Phonics They Use

Guided Reading (10 minutes)

Reading a variety of predictable book and/or sight word books together, often re-reading favorite titles and writing and illustrating our own version of the book.

Writing (30 minutes)

1. Penmanship

-practice letter formation in a variety of ways (tracing in the air, finger tracing tactile letters, making them on forgiving surfaces like chalkboards/whiteboards/magnetic boards) while singing the corresponding Letterland rhyme/song. At the end of the year, we began printing them on 3-line paper.

2. Journal Writing

-encourage independent writing and illustrating using the classroom word wall and/or invented spelling, moving away from wavy "grownup writing" and "driting"

-introduction to some conventions of writing (left to right progression, simple punctuation, word spacing, use of capital letters) and using a writer's checklist by year-end to self-correct.

Math (30 minutes)

This year, we used the Jump Math grade one workbooks available for a very reasonable price on Amazon. (The primary grades at many of the private Christian schools are using this for their curriculum.)

Science/Socials/Health and/or Music (30 minutes)

Some of our themes included: Seasons/Holidays, Under the Sea, Insects.

Lunch Break

Self-Selected Reading (30 minutes)

Teacher Read-aloud

Independent Reading

Despite Covid, we still managed to take a few field trips:

Ameliasburgh Museum

Campbell's Orchard

Macaulay House Museum

A highlight for us this year was celebrating the 100th day of school together.

Unfortunately for us, homeschool takes a backseat to yard and garden work in the spring. Rather than end the year with a bang, we kind of fizzled out this year. However, by beginning our year in August, taking just one week off for Christmas, and skipping March Break completely, we were still able to put in 115 days for Kindergarten. All in all, it was a good year but we are definitely enjoying our summer break!