half way there and learning toys!

I thought I would post a little update on how school is going for us. In short, we love it! Yesterday as we were driving around with a friend, he and Ian were talking about how when they would miss a day of school even for a doctors visit it was so cool to them. They would think, 'wow! Is this what people do during the day??' It was surreal to them that life went on outside the school building. I remember thinking things like that too! One of the positive things about homeschooling is that my kids will always know that there is life beyond school. And they will have practice every day learning how to live the way they will some day when they make families/lives of their own. This is an aspect of homeschooling that I expected, but there have been a few positives recently that I did not expect.

The main one is the freedom that it brings! I've always tried to maintain a decent sleeping routine for my kids. I like them to be well rested:) So it's nice to not have something else during the week that we have to be at. I really like just being able to take each day at a time. If we're feeling tired or cranky or sick we can just hang out and do nothing that day. Or if we're really needing some friend time we can schedule a play date. Then we can do some letter activity or readings later in the day. Another thing is how little time it takes. I have seen her learn so much in the past few months and we really only spend about 20 concentrated minutes 4-5 days a week on learning activities. Although, to be fair, a lot of her toys and tv shows and computer times are probably also learning time too!

Those are just a couple things we love. I am loving homeschooling and have been so grateful for the way it fits with our family. God lead us here and it's cool to see how he's provided. I thought I would share a couple things Mary got for Christmas that I've really loved so far for homeschooling:
The LeapFrog Tag Reading system. This thing is awesome. It reads words individually or it will read the whole page. It is easy to figure out, even for a 3 year old. And there are some pages that have little games on them. She will sit and play with it for close to an hour. It is a great activity for the time between when Noah's nap starts and when hers does. That way I can get some stuff done too!

Crayola's Dry Erase Activity Center. This is my second most loved gift. She isn't great at writing yet, but I know she will get there some day and this thing means I don't have to laminate pages to make them dry erase-able! She is mostly doing pre-writing stuff like tracing lines and connect the dots. You just slide your paper underneath the glass/plastic part and then you can write. So awesome.

This is Melissa and Doug's pattern blocks and boards and you can't really go wrong with that. I love this because we don't have much in the way of patterns and spacial reasoning skills. This fits the bill! She also is getting better at doing jig saw puzzles so that works too. This set helps us work on shapes and colors. Although she already knows all of these shapes and colors it's a good way to review.