The Adventure of School At Home

To say that I was nervous and stressed about homeschooling Maggie is an understatement. I was totally overwhelmed with information.

After the first few days of "formal" work I felt SO much better about our ability to make this work. I found out that Maggie is a bit of a work-hog and was able to double the amount of lessons that I'd planned for us to do. I decided to do weekly lesson plans so that I could plan to cover certain things over a weekly period.

One of the reasons that we like the idea of homeschool, is because you can allow your child(ren) to work at their own pace, whether it's fast or slow. Starting next week, she'll be required to do the amount that I've planned, but she'll also be able to do an extra lesson or two if that's what she wants, but she is required to do a certain amount of work. I'm not letting her run our classroom. Allowing her to work at her own pace will mean that I'll have to do lesson plan work on a daily basis, but that's okay. We really want to feed her love of learning when she's just starting out. I really think that keeping children engaged helps to foster a love of learning, hopefully for a lifetime.

Maggie often does her phonics and handwriting work shortly before Ellie's nap because she is eager to "get to work". During Ellie's nap we focus on math, reading, history and geography. She loves looking at maps and finding things on our globe. Next week we are doing lots of geography, thanks to a great book I checked out at the library yesterday.
Ellie is pretty serious about her work too!!

I didn't think that I would love doing this, but I do! I can truly say that I adore teaching Maggie math concepts and how to read a map and crazy things like that! I have felt more fulfilled and this adventure has been such a blessing so far.

And on a completely different note...
Today is the birthday of a very special young lady. On July 1, 1994 a sweet baby girl was born. Her mom had undiagnosed Vasa Previa, just like we had with Maggie. Unfortunately, Kayla wasn't born completely healthy like our Maggie was. Kayla has never spoken, never eaten and never taken a first step. Kayla's mom has been such a source of inspiration for me and Kayla is very loved and well-taken care of. Just a reminder to me that we are so very blessed.