Upstate SC Homeschoolers

I am hoping to find others in our area that are homeschoolers or even those who are interested in homeschooling. My children are very social girls and I would like to be able to start group activities with like minded families to give them the opportunity to spend time with their peers. I will love to help anyone interesteg in stating the journey into homeschooling. It takes some time and research to choose the best path for you, but you will truly be pleased with your experience as a homeschooler.   My email address is estefanak17@yahoo.com   or lilryehomeschool@gmail.com .  Anyone is welcome no matter your background

5/30/11- Full day of fun

Sooo, I have been a little anxious about home schooling for a number of reasons. Mostly because we hadn't had a real full day to see how the girls take to it. Today was that day.
In the morning, after breakfast and bedmaking, we started with some funny songs to get moving. Then we read "Down comes the Rain" by Franklin M. Branley. This is a great book for giving insight on clouds and the water cycle. After we learned abour water vapor and evaporation we filled a cup with water and marked a line on the side to indicate how full it was, then placed it outside. After several hours we checked to see if anything had evaporated and marked a new line when it had.

We had a snack then I had the girls read "My River" by Shari Halpern, outloud to me. This book was cute and had a lot of river vocabulary words. Lilly chose those vocabulary words for her writing assignment and she wrote each one 10 times. Riley practiced whriting her phone # and where we live (in complete sentences of course). At this point it was 10 am and they seemed a little burned out so I went out to mow the lawn and let them have a "brain break".   Since it is Memorial day I figured it would be good to talk about what the holiday means so we did. Next, we played on the computer placing the states in their appropriate spots on the US map. I think this is the website for that game:  jimspages.com/states.htm    I knew at this point we were close to having fulfilled our requirements for the day, yet I was playing online and found more things for them and just asked if they wanted to keep going and they did. We went on the Scholastic website and listened and read along with "Duck for President" by Doreen Cronin and talked about elections. Lastly we drew pictures of our family and did our math worksheets for the day. All that and the girls cooperated every step of the way and seemed to enjoy themselves. Lilly said that was more than she ever learned at public school. Amazing!   I know every day won't be this good but for today I am a happy homeschool mom. Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday will be their last public school days. So then we are free to to our home school activities again.

5/29/11- Little of this/ Little of that

Today is Sunday so we are taking it easy for the most part. We went to church and Sunday school this morning at St. Pauls Lutheran church in Gaffney, SC. At church todays lesson was about understanding that we are never alone. Sometimes we feel we need something with us to comfort us and we are sad if we don't. But we shouldn't feel sad because God is always with us. I helped in the nursery today, so the girls stayed with me. We read about Daniel in the Lions den.  When we cam home the girls practiced their writing. Lilly wrote her name and her address inside college spaced lines and Riley wrote upper and lower case C's, D's and E's and several words that went along with each. After that they swam in the pool a good bit and I read them a book called "Rain, Rain, Everywhere" by Christine Leeson. This will be a great start to our lesson on clouds this week.
Well, I didn't have anything planned after reading but Lilly said she wanted to practice math so I created some quick addition and subtraction sheets. Lilly is doing 3 number sets without carrying like: 354+122. Riley is still doing basic addition but I threw in some subtraction to see how she does.

5/28/11- Greenville Zoo Trip

I had a lesson in weather and clouds planned out for this morning, but daddy had different ideas. When the girls woke up we gathered in the kitchen and I showed them how to make muffins (from package).  Still this works with followong instruction as well as some measurement. Too, learning how to cook this early on, can only help. After we ate our muffins, we decided a day trip as a family sounded nice. We loaded everyone and headed to thr Greenville Zoo about an hour away.As far as homeschooling is concerned I think thi sdefinately counts towards the field of science.lol   I took tons of pictures and hope to be able to print them and put them in an album so the girls can look at the animals with their written names, again and again. We made it a point to tell them about each one, although sometimes they were too excited I think to grasp what we were saying.

When we got home we finnished reading the "Magic Puppy" book. Which is good because I have found two free book offers; one from Barnes and noble and the other from Borders.With two girls that means 4 free books in all!! I love freebies :)

I forgot to add the math worksheets we did in the car on the way to Greenville, for our home school records. :)

Final days of Public School! 5/27/11

Our last day of public school is June the 2nd. Today was field day at school and there wasn't much learning to be had. When the girls got home I told them that we could have our first test run at what a homeschool day would be like tomorrow morning. Lilly said that she wanted to start today.lol  We played a game of opposites, first. This is pretty self explanatory; one person names a word and someone else names the opposite. I let the girls quiz me so they can try to trick me. Next we played ryhming words ( same concept as the opposite game). Since I really wasn't planning on making them do anything today, I figured I might try something later, but I really don't want to burn them out. After about an hour of free play and some supper we listened to a beginners Spanish CD. This is a cute CD with the Spanish alphabet, numbers, colors, animals, common phrases etc. They listened pretty attentively and danced some for about 20 minutes.Before bed tonight we will read some more out of "Magic Puppy" by Sue Bentley. This is a cute story that we have been breaking up into 25-30 page sections for the past couple of nights. Pretty good for a night when we did not plan to do anything at all.
Tomorrow should be fun. I set a rough outline for what I plan our day to be like. We will get up at 6:30 and the girls will make muffins (assisted of course). Next we will start a small routine of singing or dancing to a funny song to get awake, then talking about what day it is and what the weather is like. Then we will say the pledge to the flag and start with math and history. Mom says these are good subject for early morning while they are still fresh, so it sounds good to me. We are going to be focusing on clouds as a theme so we will see how we manage to tye math and all of the subjects in. After about an hour and a half we will make snack and go outside to eat it and look at some clouds and try to identify them, then maybe an experiment on condensation followed by some inside writing about clouds using spelling words.  Anywho that is a rough plan so we will see how it turns out. Hopefully we can post pictures of our experiments!

1st Blog!

I am Lilly and Riley's mom. Yesterday I officially registered with the Palmetto State Association of homeschools for Gaffney South Carolina. I am EXTREMELY excited about home schooling the girls. they are finishing their 5k and 1st grade years in public school on Thursday June 2nd 2011. I am really pleased at the wealth of information there is on various home school sites, that will inevitably make this adventure much more successful.  Kathy at the Palmetto State association was such a pleasant person and I am hoping to be able to connect with other home school moms in the area relatively soon.
   The girls are very high spirited and imaginative children. Lilly is a social bug and for that reason she has mixed feelings about home schooling. Yet, I have reassured her that we will not be isolated in the house at all times. Riley is a very sensitive and emotional little lad. I can see this benefiting her because I feel I know her moods best and I can help direct her on processing her emotions in a more constructive manner.
   My head is swarming with the millions of ideas of subjects to teach, field trips to take, art projects to do, and so much more. Part of this adventure will be working the girls into these blog posts. I plan to have them start with helping my tell what their favorite part of the day is and then as we improve typing skills then they can feel free to type their own blogs.
Well I suppose that is all for now. We will be regular bloggers soon enough!