Homeschool Routine

My goal is to have a set schedule and actually finish it and accomplish it everyday. That said, there are days Lucy is completely against being put down, Molly takes ages to get down for her nap or Joe is acting like a toddler. Oh wait, he is a toddler. Anyway I'm learning to push him just a tad bit past his limit and our days are lengthening. I've learned so far that it is impossible for me to do all the sit down work at a time. We get up, go out side, craft and come back to table time.

We start our morning homeschool routine by looking at the weather. We step outside and feel the air, look at the sky and then determine what the weather is.  After that we work on our alphabet. We sing the ABC song, work on our letter of the week and do a puzzle instead of flashcards. I like the idea of flash cards, I do. But to sit a 3 year old down and flash a flashcard in his face and expect him to learn is just asking too much IMHO.

I've found a really fun way somewhere on internet world (I'm working hard on remembering to site my work!) to use a puzzle instead of flashcards. When the pieces are all in I say a letter and he takes it out and then same when we're putting them back in. We do this instead of doing them in order so he learns them as an individual letter.

After our letters we get into our preschool in a bag and read some books. I like the repetition of reading the same books all week, and repetition is great for kids!

After reading Joe practices his writing by tracing shapes. We only do one or two lines of this because I think at this age control of the pencil is very difficult AND it's very frustrating for kids to see themselves trying SO hard and not getting it perfect. I try to gently prompt and not yell, "You're doing it WROOOONG." Which I did actually say once, really it just slipped out. I know, horrible mother. It's frustrating to me too, to see him NOT try because he's already discouraged. So that's that. We do it real quick and slip it in just so that he's accustomed to it being there.

Joe absolutely loves crafts and art and coloring. He is so creative and great at it, it's an area that he greatly excels in so I tend to spend the longest on the craft as a type of reward/school is fun! kind of thing.

So that's about all we do. It's pretty fun and the 1.5 - 2 hours is takes to go through all that goes by really quickly.