Today my camera accompanied me during our school day. I took pictures of my little ones as we did different subjects. Our school days may look a little different than the standard homeschool. We use a flexible time schedule so we don’t do x, y, and z subjects everyday. Today we did Bible, Drama, Typing, Language Arts, French, Map Reading, PE, Science, Phonics and Math and spent nearly 5 hours total on our school day.
To start off the day the kids spent about 30 minutes dancing to praise and worship music.
This is the drama portion of our day. They are doing a readers theater play on Louis Pasteur. They are using “microphones” for their narrator parts.
My older son then moved onto Mavis Beacon typing. He does this independently. My younger son and I did Mad Libs together. I am using Mad Libs about once a week to introduce grammar to my first grader. After this we moved onto lunch. During lunch they watched a French DVD. They then had about a 45 minute break that they used to go online and look at astronomy and weather websites.
We learned about map legends and explored local bike and walking trail maps. We only spent about 15 minutes doing this.
Time for PE. I am utilizing Dr Sears Lean Kids program. Part of the program emphasizes attitude and today we learned how laughter is good for the body. We spent the time telling jokes.
We took a little time to check on our seeds to see how much they had grown. We take pictures of them every 10 days to track their growth.
My older son wrote a short story using an assignment from Grammar Island. Once he finished writing it by hand he typed it on his blog. My younger son and I did phonics together. He has been using Explode the Code online, but was getting stuck on one part so I watched him complete the difficult lesson and then we explored the difficult points using a whiteboard and markers before he went back to Explode the Code online and completed the difficult lesson. This took about 45 minutes all together.
Our last subject of the day was math. They are both using Singapore math. My younger son spent almost the entire 45 minutes learning an addition strategy using a whiteboard. My older son did a lesson in his textbook and workbook before moving on to a more complex lesson where we practiced examples in the textbook using a whiteboard.
That was our day. Everyday is different. I like it that way.
This is our first year of Singapore and I like it. I am doing living math (books and math DVDs) along with a separate math facts program. I’ve found more of the opposite. It seems to give “too much” time for explaining so we end up skipping some, but that may because we switched programs and some things are review.
We use Singapore math also, but I found that some more explaining needs to be done in some areas. With the math curriculum we use now it works good in conjunction with Singapore. How is for you?
Wow, your little girl is growing up! She has such a sweet smile 🙂
Looks like a great day all round, thanks for sharing it.