Comments are fixed.
Sorry about that! It’s what I get for never posting.
Our Homeschool Journey — First Grade!
In case this isn’t clear from previous posts, we are a homeschooling family. I’m going to be linking myself to some homeschool sites, and therefore, will be trying to do some updates on our HS experience from time to time as time allows—which admittedly, is not that often. But I want to do something to contribute to the HS community and to other moms who might be just like I was last year (and years before), searching for real-life experiences, advice, and tips from the trenches, in order to plan my own homeschooling venture. Browsing through HS sites last year was incredibly helpful to me for planning my future HS space, for researching curriculum choices, and for deciding what kind of schedule might work for us. And just for encouragement. There is much hostility from our public-school-based society toward homeschooling. There is a lot of resentment from other moms who can’t (or won’t) HS. There’s a lot of worry on the part of older parents/grandparents, who don’t know a lot about living outside the system that they were taught to trust during the 20th century. There is just so much that is misunderstood about HS! I hope to demystify it, if possible, for someone who might be considering it, but is nervous because of the kinds of reactions they’re sure to encounter from their family and friends. I want to show you that HS is completely doable, no matter who you are, and that it’s very much a “normal” choice for you and your child(ren).
As for me, I’m a full-time, stay at home mom of two boys, ages 5 and 2. I did a trial of HS back in ‘07 with my then-3-yr-old; we did preschool, which consisted mostly of my teaching him letter sounds, numbers, and shapes, as well as teaching him to write. You can check my homeschool category for links to posts I made back then as we enjoyed that experience. We both loved it. He not only learned all his letter sounds that summer, but he started sounding out his first words. At age three. Then his little brother came along, and I took a year and a half off. He continued to progress, though, and he started officially reading on his own last year, at age four. He’s an excellent reader now at age five, and most importantly, he loves to read anything and everything. He also loves to write! He writes elaborate, original stories that are a wonderful source of entertainment to us. He’s a very intelligent, very talented boy.
So with all that in my mind, I knew that kindergarten would be a wasted year for him. He knew how to read, write, and was starting to add single-digit numbers early this summer. I knew that we were probably looking at him being on at least a first-grade level. So I got to work researching curriculum and grade placement, and after much research and much, much agonizing, I chose ABeka’s first grade curriculum. We’re just doing math and language arts this year, so I bought him the Arithmetic 1 curriculum and their Language Arts 1 curriculum, which consists of Phonics, Language, Spelling, and Reading. He is also doing handwriting, but I didn’t get ABeka’s handwriting course, because they teach cursive in 1st grade. I don’t agree with that, so I just have him practice handwriting each day by writing a few sentences, which come from a variety of sources (which I’ll cover at a later time).
In July, we started the first grade. I started in July because I wanted a head start in case I had more health problems crop up (I had been sick for four months at the time, but was getting better). I’ve since decided that year-round school is the way to go, with random week-long breaks mixed in whenever we decide we’d like a week off. How cool is that? One of the many reasons HS is the way to go! 
We’ve already tackled the first quarter of first grade, and we took last week off to celebrate. We’re back to the grind this week.
We do schoolwork for about 1.5 hours each day, Monday thru Thursday. Friday is test day; he has a math test, a phonics test, a spelling test, and his memory verse recital each Friday. So far he’s been a star student, with all 100s on his tests every week! He gets to go out with Daddy and get a special treat every week, as a reward for his good grades.
On top of the time we spend together on his lessons, he has daily “seatwork”, which is just worksheets or other little activities that he does independently to reinforce what we learned that day. He usually spends anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour on that. Granted, the actual work is about 20 minutes’ worth of work (if that). He just tends to dawdle, so that’s where the extra time comes in. 
He’s gotten much better about it lately, though, to his credit. I think he came to realize that it’s his own choice as to whether he wants to spend all afternoon sitting at the table, instead of going outside to play or doing something else fun!
I’ll post again later and go over our daily schedule in more detail. I’ve also been taking pictures of our HS space, which I’ll also be posting at a later date. Is there anything else you’d like to see or know more about?