Homeschool -- Week 1

 I can hardly believe that this is real life, and we are actually homeschooling! This year has already been so crazy with the Covid quarantine, and now this is just one more thing I never expected to happen. Despite all my nervousness, when I really think about it, I have the perfect background and am in a good situation to be able to do this. Growing up, I always wanted to be a teacher and a mother. For the first year of college, I trained in Elementary Education before switching to Secondary Education-- History Teaching. I have the skills necessary to do this, and I am able to stay at home during the day to teach them. That is truly a blessing! I know we will have challenging days, but I am so excited about my curriculum choices, and I know that we will be blessed as we try our best.

Organizing is one of my talents, so I used all of my pent up nervous energy to prepare all of our materials, create schedules, and organize our classroom. I am so happy with how everything turned out, and I hope that the boys will feel like they have a comfortable, special place to homeschool. 

I wanted to start the year as normal as possible, so we did our traditional first day of school pictures. I even had the boys get dressed up, though I'm sure that will not be a regular occurrence for homeschool! Hyrum was especially excited to start. He has been watching me put together everything and couldn't wait to get going. On our first day of school, he came into my room while I was still in bed. He nudged me on the shoulder and said, "Mom, I am dressed in my best clothes so that we can start school." That boy is pure excitement and happiness, and I am ever so grateful for his bubbly personality. Here are our first day of school pictures... including one of my first day as a homeschool Mom!

Overall, the kids did great this week! I am thrilled with all the programs we chose, and things have gone very smoothly so far. We get up, eat breakfast, do a little Morning Devotional that includes Come Follow Me and saying our Family Goals, and then we head to the homeschool room to work. We have been completely done with school before lunch every day so far. The boys work so hard and get so much accomplished that 3 hours seems to be more than enough time to adequately teach every subject. Some highlights of the week were:

Beast Math: Designing their own monsters for their profile was way more exciting than I anticipated. In order to unlock body parts like eyes, arms, etc. they have to answer math questions. This motivated them to do a lot of math. Even with all the math they did, I think they probably spent more time on their monsters though. Haha!

Portuguese: Andrew has Portuguese as an elective. It is my hope that we can keep up well enough that if Andrew and Hyrum decide to go back to public school next year that they will be be on the same level (or more advanced!) than the rest of their immersion classes. That is a huge time commitment for us, but we are working hard to make it happen. We have made it a family goal, so every night after dinner we do some lessons from our subscription to Talkbox.mom, followed by reading the children's Book of Mormon Reader in Portuguese. It has been so good for all of us. Christian, who hasn't had any formal language training, is picking it up so quickly, and I am so proud of him.

Cooking Class with Grandma:

Although it isn't part of our official schedule, we have scheduled a cooking class with Grandma Hill every Thursday. After I mentioned the idea, she got really excited and created a full schedule for the rest of the year. It is going to be so much fun! They are going to make box ovens, cook a breakfast, make and frost Halloween sugar cookies, do several parts of a Thanksgiving dinner, make Christmas candy, and so much more. I am just so thrilled that they have this opportunity and so thankful that Mom Hill was so willing to be part of our homeschool adventure. This week they made homemade ice cream in a can. They got to kick the can all over the yard to churn the cream, and then she let them each choose their own candy to put in it.

Engineering: 

Hyrum chose to do an engineering class using a subscription box from Kiwico Crates. Every month they will send him a new box to put together. He has been so anxious to put together his "Arcade Grabber Hand," and he finally got to do it. He carefully read all of the directions and then worked with me to put it together. He did a great job problem solving and building. Once it was finished, he carried around his grabber hand everywhere, trying to pick up different objects. We just got a new box in the mail, and he can't wait to do more!

Marine Biology: 

For Science this year, we are just going to choose several different units and do them family style. The Good and the Beautiful has a free Marine Biology unit, so I decided to do it first to see if we liked it. I contacted another homeschool family in our ward to see if they wanted to do science together. I am so glad I did. It is so nice to have someone else to share the load with. It is also nice to have more kids to teach. Altogether, there are 6 kids, so I definitely put more time and energy into preparing the lesson than I might have otherwise. We did three different water experiments about salinity, temperature, and light in the ocean. Christian was my big helper, and the lesson turned out great. We love the Buskers, and I hope we have a great year doing science together.

I'm sure that the newness of homeschool will wear off, and we will have the regular school struggles, but so far, I am thankful that I was able to do this. We got an email at the end of the week from the local high school saying that someone tested positive for covid, so they would have to quarantine 3 classes and cancel the weekend football game. It just reminded me why we are doing this. I am expecting that there will be many disruptions like that throughout the year, but we won't have to worry about them. We can just continue to do our thing and learn at our pace. There is definitely peace having my kids gathered safe in our home.