trying on the homeschool hat

I've been questioned quite a bit by my homeschooling families, friends and family about what are plans are for Addie in regards to education and the truth is I'm not quite sure. I feel very torn. Never thought I'd say that. On one hand I want Addie and Liam to have the mainly positive public school experience that I had and on the other I've been completely blown away by the amazing education my homeschooling parents are giving their children. I'm scared of the stigma though and even more scared of the enormous responsibility. Public school is familiar and I find comfort in that. I can picture my kids experiencing fun classroom activities, making friends at recess, having back-to-school night. And if something goes wrong, it won't necessarily be solely my fault. However, I'm also encouraged by the awesome people my homeschooled students are becoming! They get to bypass a level of negativity, insecurities, and peer-pressure that comes with public schools. They take field trips and are exposed to the arts. They're active in boy scouts, soccer, gymnastics, fencing, 4H, you name it, they're getting out there and socializing. Their parents get to provide them with a very individualized education and curtail every lesson to their child. Skipping over the easy parts and moving on to the more challenging lessons.  Why wouldn't we want this for our children? Hmmm...Kevin and I have lots of deliberating ahead of us.

For now we've started our summer school fun and I'm trying on this homeshooling hat in the process. A couple of my moms have asked me to post over the summer so I'll be writing this from more of a professional view but wanted to add the memories to our personal blog as well.

So here are some thoughts and plans...

Pacing:
Addie started reading back in February and has shown many signs of being ready for more. So I decided to start her off with the Kindergarten/1st grade curriculum, even though she's not technically eligible for Kindergarten until Fall of 2014. Although I think the state standards can be a great guide, I'm a firm believer in letting your child facilitate their own pace, not the public schools.
Setting the Stage:
I also believe it's important to create a good workable space. So we added a few things to our very small office/classroom. Such as a new bookshelf to organize all of my stuff, but I won't bore you with that. I added a Word Wall, I have a calendar down at her level, a place for our weekly poem, and we use the easel to do the week's phonics or word work. Then a lot of stuff went in baskets and up so little brother couldn't get his hands on them.
Here's a little peek into our "classroom."

Curriculum:
If money were no object, I would have purchased the whole kit and caboodle for Super Kids. I have been so impressed with this reading curriculum. But unfortunately, money is an object AND I've got boxes and boxes of great resources from when I was in the classroom. So I'm picking and pulling from those. Each day/week I have a checklist of what I'm covering and I'm taking the unit titles from Social Science and Science to guide my teaching in Language Arts.
For math, my plan was to do half with me and half on the computer. But when I tested Addie out on the 1st grade math in Adapted Mind, it was too difficult for her. Since Adapted Mind starts at 1st grade, we'll just have to save that for later and I'll find other ways to teach math.
Daily Plan/Checklist:

• Calendar - we talk/sing about the days of the week, talk about number patterns, how many days until, write the date, and count how many days we've been doing "school" (I'll talk about this one more later). There is so much to learn centered around the calendar. 
• Weekly Poem - this related to our unit title/topic for Social Science or Science. I choose simple poems full of sight words. Each week I let her draw a picture of the meaning of the poem and we highlight all of the sight words found in her poem. They are usually easy to memorize and are great repetitive practice for not only sight words but vocabulary words. 
• Daily Read Aloud - this is also centered around our thematic topic from Social Science/Science.We do lots of comprehension work around the book. I ask her questions such as, "What do you predict will happen next?" "What happened in the beginning/middle/end of that story?" 
• Word Work/Phonics - each day I do something hands on with her to teach phonics. I have several activities up my sleeve from working in the classroom such as, rolling word family dice, playing bingo, a memory game with rhyming words, pocket chart activities. All of these activities are interchangeable, so as long as I do the work up front to organize them all I have to do is change out the phonics. I just try to stay away from worksheets and want to designate this time for her play while learning! 
• Independent Reading- I have several books between BOB Books and many printable books, such as these. Everyday I have Addie read a book to me, sometimes repeating old ones. I think this piece is so crucial for many reasons. 
• Handwriting - because she is just starting out to form letters, I think it's important to teach her letter formation "the right way." I love Handwriting Without Tears' strategic approach to teaching letter formation. So I'm starting there. Each day we do a quick handwriting practice. Then I always star my favorite one. She loves this and I find it very motivating for her.
• Writing - each day I want her to practice writing and more importantly I want to practice it with her. I love that I can be one on one with her. What an advantage this is compared to teaching writing to 20+ students all at once! Each day I will give her a prompt, which will often include the sight word we are working on. For instance yesterday, we were working on "are" so the prompt was "We are..." Then Addie said, "We are astronauts!" So she drew me a fabulous picture of us in outerspace. Developmentally at this stage, they should always draw a picture first. Then she wrote "We are" and I helped her with the astronaut part. I wrote out _ _ _ronaut. Then she sounded out the first three letters.
• Number Sense - This won't always be number sense, but I'm starting there. I downloaded a great little book from teacherspayteachers.com for three bucks! Here's the link. It's simple and works with number formation, recognition and showing how many. 

I know it seems like a lot but we actually are done in about one to two hours! I also hope to add field trips, art, who knows maybe even a little foreign language! For now though, it's all about getting into our routine.
I'm shooting to post each week about our progress. I will post our poem of the week, the read-a-louds we are reading, some details about one of our hands-on phonics activities and each month I'll post a "Look At Me In (Month)" writing page. Stay tuned for more!