Home Pre-School

*Sisters-Best Friends*

Home Pre-School. I had been kicking around the idea of working with the girls some more with their letters (mainly Abbey since Anne already knows her alphabet), but thought I should probably do it on a more regular basis and have some new and creative ideas to put with them.

Thanks to Trent's cousin, Dana, who blogs at Growing by the Sea I was introduced to ABC Scripture Memory. I thought a simple thing to do would be to do a Letter of the Week (starting with A) and correlate the Scripture memory to go with it. I thought this would also give me a good idea if homeschooling while having toddlers and babies would even be feasible for me.

Well, I love it. I try to have fun craft to go with each letter. For "C" we colored an upper and lower case "C" to look like the spots on a cow. Then we went to our local dairy and looked at the cows. (We actually do this almost every week when we get milk, but we focused our time there that week with making the sound that "c" makes and looking for other words that start with the letter "c").

The children love it (even my crazy Magdalena!). Maggie likes to trace the letter of the week with her finger, the other girls have practice writing their letters, they have some activity books that they find really enjoyable. And, the best thing that I have found about teaching them at home is that we can go outside and have "Adventures for A", pick "Berries for B", go see the "Cows", we bought a "Dresser" on craigslist. So really, everywhere we go that week we focus on finding words that start with that letter. The children are really encouraging to one another. It's not uncommon to hear Anne tell Abbey, "Great job, Abbey! I didn't even think of that. Yeah, crow starts with "C"!!"

We still have about a year to decide what to do for school. After this brief trial run I think I could not only just homeschool, but I could love homeschooling the girls. Our local public school has Kindergarten just 1/2 day and provide busing in the morning and the late afternoon. So I would be responsible to either pick Anne up from school at 11:30 (toting all my other little kiddies with me right before lunch), or I would have to drop her off for afternoon kindergarten around 1:00 (you know, nap time). And I'm sure I could do this, even though it seems like a lot, but the other issue is that I would have to do this 3 years in a row.

So, we're still undecided at this point. Maybe I would just homeschool for Kindergarten. Although I'm sure it'll be hard to let her go after that. What can I say? I love being a Mama and a teacher.