Homeschooling in the Mountains

Well here they are overdue and in their semi full glory! :op We don't have a school room per say so much as a section of our office dedicated to the storage and then a portable "school table". I got this AWESOME table at sams club that is 4' long and folds in half with a handle. The best part is it is height adjustable!!! It goes from perfect toddler crafting level to full adult table level! Best part it only set me back 29 bucks :o)



Ok so on to the "room"
Click on the pics to go to the photo with notes of what everything is!

Today's letter is H. So with that wee decided to build a habitat which is a new word to T. After explaining that a habitat was kind of like a house in that it is where a creatures lives I asked T what he'd like to make a habitat for. Of course being a total boy he wanted to do a habitat for dinos! So We gathered up some paper bags, strapped the baby on with a wrap got our shoes and went out to gather some stuff for our dino habitat. We gathered a bag of dried grass from the edge of the woods, a bag of sticks, a bag of dried leaves (YAY fall) and a bag of various size rocks. We then came inside and got some cotton thingies (for clouds), construction paper, some of daddy's old model trees, mini plastic dinos and our box of kids supplies (scissors, crayons ect.) We had a blast putting it together and T loved looking into it to see the dinos!

A view in through our viewing hole! Rawr :op

A view with the lid off

After building it T wanted to know what a volacano was so we looked up some eruptions on youtube. He was of course enthralled so I think when we get to V we shall build ourselves a nice "working" volcano!

I have been a bit lazy on posting about our lapbooking adventures. We do a letter each day and after we make our lapbooks T plays the corresponding game for the letter on HOP. This is really solidifying the letters for him and getting him really into it! The boy practically begs for "homework" LOL I can't wait to see what this early reinforcement and love of learning pans out to in the future! We are up to letter G right now and getting ready to do letter H today which hopefully I'll post pics of tomorrow. Without further ado the lapbooks A-G!

I heard about this wonderful system by Sue Patrick called workboxes. http://www.workboxsystem.com/ The idea behind them is to let your children have a visual reference for how much work they need to accomplish in a day. I love parts of the system but as a whole it is not totally for us so I decided to tweak it to fit our needs. I went out to target and got the little wire rack for the plastic shoe boxes.



Instead of using all boxes on my shelf I am using magazine holders on the top shelf to hold the girls' larger things like books and folders that I don't want to squish into the boxes. The bottom three shelves hold 6 boxes total which will be used for things like science experiment kits, art and other such things. Instead of the little strips that most people are using for each child we are using a large pocket chart which will act as a schedule and to do list. in the middle strip of the pocket chart will be cards with the time of day on them and then the left side will be ODSD's to do cards and the right will be YDSD's.


The cards will be labeled with numbers or subjects which will correspond to the magazine holders and boxes for the day. Each girl will also have a folder with velcro dots on the inside for putting the completed box's tag on as they finish out their work.

This may end up tweaked more yet as we get into using it but for now this is how it will work. I'll try to update with pics once it is all completely set up!

I am stalking our mail-lady lately as the textbooks have begun to arrive. :op Each day I go to the mail giddy like a child on Christmas morning eagerly awaiting to see what new treasure is hidden in the boxes that have been appearing in the mail. So far the booty includes: story of the world vol 1 text and activity books, wordly wise 3000 book 2 set, singapore math 2b set, spelling workout book b set and first language lessons for the well trained mind.

I am getting so much enjoyment out of peering through the texts and plotting out my lesson plans in my teacher's notebook!!

I had intended on homeschooling my kiddos since I was preggo with DS1 3 years ago. I decided I would blog our experiences and learning in the beginning and ongoing journey of homeschooling our kids! We are not using a "boxed" type curriculum this year but more of pieces here and there to form what in my mind will be an awesome learning experience for our kiddos!