Confession: Mommy School

Leila showing off her bubbles (2013)

I have a confession to make: I've homeschooled before. When our daughter was three, Wes and I decided not to shell out the thousands of dollars for preschool but instead I created "mommy school" and we did homeschool preschool. It helped that my own mother was a preschool teacher before becoming a mommy and she shared with me all kinds of great resources to teach colors and numbers that she had saved. It also helped that preschool is awesome and lesson plans were easy by just going through the alphabet, one letter a week. I found free worksheets online (yay pinterest!) and had Leila practice tracing and writing the upper case and lower case letters and the rest of the time we just did activities that started with the letter of the week: B is for bubbles, C is for Candy Land, G is for (mini-)golf, etc. We had a great time mostly just playing together. However, Mommy school also happened to be during my "angry mama" phase I mentioned, so things weren't always as cute and smiley as they are in the picture and I didn't follow through very well once I ran out of ideas and steam. We still read lots of books together and visited the library weekly, something we continue to do now, but there was also a lot of television time instead of hands-on activities and days we just stayed home instead of pursuing adventure or a new experience because I couldn't handle the thought of dealing with both kids outside of the house. Now, of course, I'm wistful about the easy (curriculum-wise) mommy school days and sorrowful that I was angry so much of the time.
When the time came to enroll Leila in kindergarten, Wes and I briefly considered continuing to homeschool, but at the same time we were looking forward to our first foster placement and the thought of sending at least one kid out of the house for part of the day was very appealing to me. I've said before that Leila loved kindergarten and so I don't regret sending her, and it maybe extended my sanity in the fostering months to have that break. In any event, I have sought forgiveness from God and from my children for my anger and I look ahead with joy and anticipation of the blessings to come. I know homeschooling my now elementary-age children won't be all giggles and games, but I'm confident that my heart is in the right place (thank you Jesus) and I'm eager for the opportunity to do better this time around.

Octonauts for Pre-K

pretty much the second we decided to have Cameron be homeschooled for kindergarten, I turned to pinterest to look up fine motor skills activities, math games, and other fun learning activities we can use next year along with reading, reading, and more reading together. In the process, I came across some things that are perfect for his stage and interest level now and since he is still home with me three days a week while his sister is in school, I printed off some activities to help us get into the groove of school at home together. These (free printable!) Octonauts activities from royalbaloo.com have been a huge hit! We love Octonauts in our house, despite my initial reservation that they were too babyish for my kids. Cameron (and even Leila) will watch with great interest and the ocean facts learned on the show have sparked discussions and motivated further fact-finding missions for both my kids.
To start off our Octonauts activities, first, I let him watch an episode of Octonauts while I took my shower, since it didn't happen in the morning rush, and Wes was asleep upstairs, having just come off the night shift. I promised him some one-on-one time after I was cleaned up and he was so excited to sit down with me and do "homework."

Once the show was over and I was halfway put together, we did some pre-writing with dry-erase markers (I put the printed sheet into a sleeve protector). Cameron is most happy with a blank sheet of paper (rather, a whole blank pad!) and a marker and will sit contentedly for hours drawing robots, sea creatures, Star Wars scenes, and people, but I wanted to see how he would follow directions and tracing. Looks like he did pretty well! He even asked to do this again later in the day.

While Cameron was working on tracing, I was folding up a dice featuring the Octonauts characters for our next activity - graphing! At first I said to roll the dice ten times and we'd see who had the most rolls, but Cameron was way into it, so I changed it to, "Let's have a race and see who gets five rolls first!" Cameron responded so positively to the idea of a race, and we played this game over and over again (Shellington won three races in a row, hence the next picture!), and even played it again in the afternoon while we waited for Leila to get home from school. Again, I used a sleeve protector and dry erase marker to be able to play this game multiple times without wasting paper. 

The activity pack features tons of other games and practices, and I didn't print everything off, but there are a few other things I've saved to pull out another day. For now, Cameron is super excited about having mommy be his teacher and asks me, "how many more days until I'm homeschooled? how many more days until kindergarten?" When Wes told him it was close to 100, he was a little discouraged, but we'll keep having fun with these pre-k activities in the meantime and look forward to September together!  

Also, looking at these pictures makes me realize that we really need a curtain or shade in this room that is slowly turning into our homeschool room if we're going to be productive morning workers in a few months!