Brand New Year, Brand New Start

The new year has brought lots of exciting changes and activities at our little castle. First, I have started preschool homeschool with the girls. Since before I even met Steve, I have a calling to home school my children. I went to a wonderful public elementary school, but I still had a difficult time reconciling what I learned there about things like Evolution with what I was learning at Sunday School about Creation. My private Christian middle and high school was really not that great at all and the education or lack there of is a running joke in our family. Finally, the time that I spent traveling as a speaker to schools of all types confirmed my decision. While I saw some really great schools with wonderful teachers, I also saw a lot of horrible teachers. I guess I just feel like God has entrusted Steve and I with these three precious princesses and that it is our responsibility to educate them. I also hope that homeschooling will cause us to have a close-knit family through the quality time spent together. Plus, how great will it be to head off to Europe when we study medieval history! That will be quite the field trip.

Bethany is only two and a half, so I am not really pushing her with this, but just taking her along for the ride with Abigail. I started this week with a site called Letter of the Week. It is a free curriculum put together by another homeschool mom. This week was all about just immersing them in the alphabet. We have been doing alphabet coloring sheets using the letters of their name, reading alphabet books, playing alphabet games (Abigail loves alphabet bingo!) and watching videos about the alphabet. Next week we will start with lessons about the letter "A". I definitely need to spend several hours this weekend putting it all together, instead of waiting each night when they go to bed to do the next days lesson.

At breakfast time, we have a bible story, devotional and then a prayer. We have several little bibles and a great "GiGi God's Little Princess" Devotional book that we are using. Bethany seems to like this part best. One morning I forgot to do it and just started eating and she said, "prayer. bible story, mommy". I really hope she is listening, because she is the one that needs it most right now (more on my terrible two year old later).

We have also started to use a Calender and Weather pocket chart each morning. We go over what day it is, what yesterday was, and what tomorrow will be. The month, the year, the date and finally the weather. Choosing the weather cards seem to their favorite thing to do. We are singing songs to help them learn the days of the week right now.

Finally, I have started using a chore chart with them. I found one on the Internet that focuses on hygiene type activities like getting dressed, brushing teeth and making their bed. They are on the fridge and they get a star for each completed activity. If they get all their stars for the day they get a treat at bed time.

We also started dance class and soccer this week. More on that in my next post . . .