Long time, no blog

I feel like it has been forever since I have posted anything and then I realize it has been nearly a month!  As much as I want this to be our virtual scrapbook, I feel like it is hard to keep up.

As soon as Christmas was over, I started planning for our next school year.  Since we choose to school year round and take days off as we need them, our curriculum is running out. Maggie would be in first grade (based oher age) if she were in traditional school.  We are currently finishing up first grade math, but everything else is second grade.  So...most of what we will be doing when we finish our current work will be third grade. It has never been our intention to be ahead.  We are much more interested in following her lead and doing what we need to do.  Which explains why we/I decided that doing another year of first grade math would be best.  Maggie was getting so frustrated with math, so I went with my gut and decided to try another curriculum.  She still gets frustrated, but the different curriculum is a much better fit for us.  I ordered ALL of our curriculum last night, so I feel like I get a little vacation from planning.  Once all of it arrives I have to decide how many days a week we will have each subject, with the core subjects being daily.  I also have a list of different things that I want to implement from journals and book reports, to art studies and manners lessons.

Once we made the decision to be a homeschooling family, we knew that our upstairs bonus room would be our future classroom.  I had thought we would wait a couple of years, but we found that we were outgrowing our kitchen table.  Our kitchen table has an unfinished wooden top (due to the fact that i stripped the finish off) and we feel completely comfortable with getting markers, glue or paint on it.  I thought about moving us into the dining room, but I try to keep that table looking nice.  Big Daddy always tells me that we will do what I need to make things better.  I shopped around online and picked out several different desk options, created a secret board on Pinterest with everything that I wanted, made a ton of lists and then we set off for Ikea.  We LOVE that place!  It's about an hour and a half away and the weather was not in our favor, but we made it there in back in snow and freezing rain and my sweet husband bought everything on my list.  We are extremely happy with our purchases!

I will share pictures of our classroom tomorrow!  Stay tuned!