Homeschooling Take 1

When I started homeschooling a month ago I was saying "What was I thinking?"  Honestly.  It was hard.  New schedule.  New disciplines.  New way of approaching things.  Being a school teacher I went into this as school at home.  I'm learning that homeschooling is school through life.  While we have curriculum and daily lesson plans we try to follow, I have had to completely change my expectations for what I thought our homeschool would be.  I like to sit down and work on everything at once and get it done, filed away, and pick up where we left off the next day.  It doesn't quite work that way.  While we do have a schedule and try to stick to it, I have had to become more malleable and take things a day at a time.  Sometimes my plans don't quite work out and sometimes he is just grumpy (ok sometimes I am too).  Sometimes he is so eager than he wants to do 3 days worth of work in 1 day.  I have had to learn to deal with it and go with the flow.  If you know me at all you know that is not easy for me.  I like my plans and I like to follow them.

Anyways, we have made progress.  Enough that even though it is still difficult at times, it has been so rewarding.  There is this special time that Levi and I get to have doing school with no interruptions and with a common goal.  I have seen him give his best and stretch himself and I've seen him become frustrated and shut down.  We've been able to work through those things together and I'm learning how to encourage him and push him past his limits in a good way rather than a frustrating way.  While I haven't mastered any of it by far, I can see little "yay moments" along the way.  Those moments when he finally learns a letter he has been struggling to grasp, when he follows directions completely, when he gives 110% to a task or activity, and all the little "aha" moments he has throughout the day when he sees what we are learning in everyday life.  It makes it all worth it when he is so happy and eager to apply what we've been learning.

Right now he is learning so much.  Most of the curriculum is things he already knows, so colors and shapes have been super easy since he already knows most all of those.  He struggles the most with his letters.  I've tried teaching them to him in the past and he was never interested.  It usually takes him several days to master it, but as we add new letters every few days he starts to get a little overwhelmed and will sometimes shut down acting like he doesn't know any of it.  As of now he has A, B, C, D and L mastered, and as been introduced to E, F, and G, but hasn't mastered them just yet.  Levi is definitely more inclined to conceptual learning.  He succeeds way quicker with his numbers than his letters and mathematical learning seems to be more of his strong suit rather than letters and word formation.  As he grows this may change, but I definitely see him gravitating to the mathematical side of learning.  Right now he can count to 15 and recognizes numbers 1-4 and just learned 5 today.  His fine motor skills are coming along nicely.  The first day we used scissors I thought I may lose my mind, but he is slowly becoming much better and aware of his cutting.  His coloring and drawing skills have developed pretty rapidly since we started school too.  Before school he would want to color the whole page of a coloring book with one color, but now he is using multiple colors on his work.  His drawing skills have also developed where before hand he couldn't (or wouldn't) draw anything.  Seriously anything you asked him to draw was a bunch of scribbles on the page.  While they were beautiful scribbles he has now branched out a little more and drew his first stick person the other day.  While it was just an enormous head and the smallest body any stick man has ever had, it was progress.  Progress that this mama is sure proud of.

I think the one thing he is probably the most proud of his learning to recognize and write his name.

Just a sample of his work.  He had to color the large circles blue and the small circles red, then he could color the rest any color he wished.  The success here is that he used the right colors (instead of the ones he wants to use) and that he finished the assignment (something he doesn't always like to do).