Caught a Break

I planned our whole year out in advanced and realized that it wasn't working for us. So, I was set out to look for another approach. I've seen these a dozen times and thought that it wouldn't work for us, but I thought why not give it a try and see. Well, it was a huge hit and I was able to walk away from the table and came back to see my children still working. WOW!!!! That is all I have to say about that because I'm able to see a different side to homeschooling and find myself able to do some things I need to do and then, I'm not left pooped at the end of the night.

This if from "Letter of the Week," she has it all laid out of course, but it wasn't fit for all ages. So, I did have to plan accordingly for my older child. However, still not difficult because all I needed to do was change the difficulty levels. Instead of putting the numbers 1-10, I did it with numbers 1-20 with the words to match the number with, for example, twenty/20 and for my 5th grader, I did multiplication/division facts.

This was used for my preschooler. I had my first grader playing with him to help him and to refresh her skills.

This was another game called, "Sight Word Dominoes," from "Letter of the Week." This works well with all grade levels because you can use the sight words by grade levels and add new ones, once they have mastered the current ones.

We then moved onto notebooking for our composers, which was Johann Sebastian Bach. This of course was one my creations. I have those listed here. I also use notebooking pages from Debra Reed for my older children because those have more in depth learning for them. The two pictures above are for my two younger children to introduce notebooking. As you can tell they enjoyed it, but I did the writing for them because they are Pre-K and 1st grades.

This is from "Confessions of a Homeschooler," and my daughter really enjoyed this. However, this was suppose to be done with squares and glue, but I thought stickers would have been more fun.

 This is also from "Confessions of a Homeschooler." My son loves his dabber and enjoyed this. I decided that we would need to get more colors, so he know has three new colors, green, orange, and red.

My daughter wanted to use the dabber, so printed off another copy. She was able to do this after she had completed her grade level Math assignment before she was able to use the dabber. Some might say that was wrong, but in my book, I say it's the right thing to do because she was eager to use the dabber, but would have to earn using it because she already knew her numbers. However, I've created larger numbers for her to use the dabber with, so she wouldn't have to do something first before using the dabber.

I can remember where I found this from, but it's not my creation. I didn't want the words that were on it, so I drew out what we needed. I also didn't have the digging bin to put the pieces in, so I used our bead container. It served the purpose and they all had fun. I also had different words for each person tweaked to their grade level and put all the letters in there for everyone to dig. So, that's why you see more than two hands in the above picture and the results below of one, of which is my first graders completion Spelling.