After several years (yes, years) of prayer, Darren and I decided to home school Nate. We never dreamed of home schooling our children. That's for weirdos who want to have little or no contact with the outside world, right? I honestly hadn't even heard a lot about home school until we started noticing a whole lot of families in our church family home school...and they are all perfectly normal and extremely social. The more we learned about it, the more we began to seriously pray about it for our family. We continued to receive confirmation after confirmation pointing us toward home school.
So, we decided we were going to home school. Now we had to tell our families and friends. I was nervous about this because there are not a whole lot of families who home school in our neck of the woods. Our church family is located in another county, where home school has been on the rise for years and now is pretty common. Not everyone has been positive, but most people have. I have honestly gotten a lot more encouragement than expected.
We started Monday, July 29th. Nate and I were very excited! I taught for six years and was a media specialist (librarian) for two years. I forgot how much I enjoy lesson planning and teaching.
We had a great first day!
Here are some other highlights from our first week. All of these ideas came from Pinterest. I love putting ideas together and executing them, but I am not very creative.
Squirting sight words
Build the word activity
Writing letters in shaving cream (mental note: you only need a very thin layer for this)
Shaving cream art (since we had a pan full of shaving cream)
Painting like cave men with things from nature...and crayola washable paint :)
Completed shaving cream art
One of my biggest concerns with home school involved where we were going to have school and how I would organize school supplies, books, etc. I really wanted to have a school room, but by the time I came to that decision it was almost time for school to start. For now we are doing school in the living area - either on the couch for reading or using Nate's table for writing and craft activities. I am storing our supplies in a cabinet my parents gave us. They found a great piece of furniture at a yard sale for $15.00 several weeks ago. It had been sitting in their storage building just waiting to be discovered. :) My dad had already stripped and sanded it. All it needed was some paint and a little distressing.
I am still working on how to display Nate's work. This iron piece was already in our living area. It occurred to me that I could use magnets to hang Nate's work until we can come up with a better plan. This is working well so far and a great way for Nate to show Darren what he's accomplished/created during the school day.
I have been working on this post for several days (mainly due to blogger issues) and now two weeks of school have come and gone. Our second week was just as fun and encouraging as our first. We certainly had some challenges each day, but overall it's been a great experience. I am so thankful for God's grace, wisdom, and provision.
