Homeschooling Hump Day

Okay, I had intended to post this last week, but never got around to typing it up. My friend Carrie is posting about Homeschooling every Wednesday. Since Kara is only three, we are only beginning to enter the realm of Homeschooling. Here are a couple of my favorite resources.

The Well-Trained Mind is a book that can give every parent the confidence to know he/she is capable of homeschooling. This book also gives you many (and I mean many) tips and resources to begin using.

Phonics Pathways This is the book I am using to teach Kara to read. This book includes games and ideas to use to help teach your child to read. It is geared towards helping older children learn how to read, but since Kara already knows her letters and sounds (thanks to Leap Frogs Letter Factory DVD), she is ready to begin learning to read.

Here is our typical 1 Hour of preschool each day -- we have "school" after lunch when Andy and Lydia are down for their naps.

1:00 -- practice her violin -- Kara is beginning Suzuki Violin 1 -- a teenager in the church is giving her lessons. Right now until we officially start lessons, Kara is naming the parts of the violin and listening to the Suzuki 1 CD

1:20 -- we play reading games and work on the lesson in Phonics Pathways.

1:40 -- We read a Bible Story together and I ask her questions about previous stories and the current story for the day.

After the Bible story I'll read her a book of her choice.

Occasionally we work on writing, but I'm not pushing her very much in this area because I don't want to spend more than 1 hour a day on school. When she works on writing though, I write out all of the vowels several times on writing paper. Then, I give her a gel pen (there is something special about being able to use a pen to trace b/c she's usually not allowed to touch pens) and she can trace the vowels.

Hope this gives you some good ideas! If anyone else has good ideas on how to teach preschoolers to use scissors, or other things we should be working on, please let me know.

For today, I wanted to tell everyone about a homeschooling giveaway that's going on over at HsKubes' Haven at Home blog.