Days 3, 4 and 5 of our first week.

I can't believe our first week of homeschooling is under our belt. It kinda seems surreal. Tuesday was a hard day but despite that, and even through that, I feel really blessed to be doing this. A small part of me feels like we're breaking some kind of rule because it seems too good to be true to have my kids home with me, and I feel like someone's gonna come say "Hey...get those kids back in school!!" and make them leave.

Happily, I know that's not gonna happen and I will get to keep enjoying them and watching them grow closer together. I have to say how amazed I am that in such a short time they do seem to be growing closer. Because they've been out of school now for over 3 weeks with Christmas break, they've been spending a lot of time together, and the more they do, the more they seem to get along. Yesterday they were in their room for almost an hour just playing together. I couldn't be happier about that, and its those times that I will focus on when things get tough.

One other cute thing I've really enjoyed is, every morning the kids bless themselves with Holy water before we start our day, and since then I have caught Katie several times, pushing a little chair over to the wall where the holy water font is and saying "holy water" in her cute, little innocent voice and then dipping her hand in saying "amen". She loves it! And I love that she does!!

DAY 3

Wednesday was a good day. We had a trip to the store planned with "Mom mom" (their grandmom) to get supplies to make rosary boxes. (Little boxes to hold their rosaries.) Because we knew we had a trip planned we didn't have a long school day planned and that made them happy, as well as motivated them to finish quickly.


*(Click on any picture to see it bigger)

Charlie is practicing writing his letters.



He is such a little Sunshine! :)




Jackson was practicing cursive for his first time. They learned pre-cursive at school, so I figured I'd better start slowly breaking him into cursive.




Katie was busy updating her own blogs on all her laptops! :)




Jackson with his completed letters. I was so impressed for his first time how well he did.




Charlie also did a great job!




Boys are such characters...I remember many a picture growing up with my brother making some kind of a silly face.

We're back from our shopping trip with Mom Mom and ready to paint and decorate our rosary boxes.

Jackson and Mom Mom are working very intently!

Everybody enjoys painting.

Wednesday afternoon we had friends over. The girls wanted to pretend to do homeschooling too! :)

My niece and possible future teacher like her mama...she's already teaching her classmates to read in kindergarten!

Our backyard fire pit in the freezing South Florida weather. :)




DAY 4

The rosary boxes after the paint dried and we decorated them.

That's my only picture from day 4. We had a trip to the grocery planned. I got all ambitious and decided I would make it a "learning" trip, so I gave them a lesson on rounding up or down to the nearest dollar thinking maybe it would keep their interest and be fun if they could help me keep a running tally on where we were at with prices at the store. Well, I think the concept was a little lost on them, and it might have worked better if I was only picking up 5-10 items, but we ended up getting a big cart full and after two isles, they cared no longer. Oh well...I tried. :)


DAY 5 (We made it to the end of the week...yippee!!) :)

Showing off their boxes with pride.

So because we had shopping trips planned on Wednesday and Thursday I wanted to have today be all about school. We accomplished a lot, the boys were really good, and we even managed to do a fun little science experiment.


I had read online about a fun, easy experiment with ants. You fill 4 or 5 small cups up with different edible items and put them near an ant hill and guess which thing you think the ants will go after most. Then you leave them for a half hour or so and see if you were right and what they liked.

We have our items all ready to go.

We tried syrup.

Cookie crumbs.

Sugar

And pickle...just to switch it up a little.

We tried our best to find a good ant hill...we found two or three stray ants and figured that was the best we were going to get.

We all made our predictions: Jackson- syrup

Charlie- cookie crumbs

Mom- sugar

Jackson declared himself the winner because when we went back all the syrup was gone, hence the #1 finger in the air. (I didn't have the heart to tell him that I was pretty sure it all just spilled out into the ground and got absorbed by the earth.) I didn't see more than one or two ants and I think they were "crazy ants" because they seemed to just be running all around. We may have to try this one again in the spring when there are more ants around.

So we close our first week. I feel like I am learning a lot about thinking more "outside the box", and know I still have a looooong way to go, but so far, its been a fun journey! :)

Please keep checking back in. I think I'll try to update once a week or if something neat or interesting happens.