I thought that it would be interesting to profile what we do in a typical homeschooling day. I say the word typical with prejudice since a typical day doesn’t really exist when you homeschool!
I use the Calvert Kindergarten Curriculum. Dawn loves workbooks and traditional learning, so I thought that it would make a good start for her educational career. She’s not even four yet, but seems to be thriving on it. I don’t plan on purchasing it again however. It’s expensive and while I think the curriculum is great, I feel I can do just as good, or better by putting together my own lessons and letting her choose what she wants to learn in the future.
We don’t have a set time to start our lessons. I usually get up, the girls get up, we eat and I might go through my email and take care of some of my business-related stuff. Usually around noon or 1 pm, we are ready to go and we take out the books.
Getting the books out is a huge event in our home. Often, when I start sweeping the floor and wiping the table, Dawn takes it as a cue to get the books out. She goes to the cabinet where they are stored and one-by-one, carries them to the table. Emily quickly joins in on the fun and helps out…Dawn hands her a book, and she brings it over. They take out ALL the books though, and I often have to carry about half of them back!
This is where we store our books...think we got enough?!? 
Then Dawn enjoys spreading the books out over the table..it kinda looks like the catalogue spreads for the Calvert books!
Dawn and Emily love getting the books out! This is their layout, not mine!
Once we settle down, we sing a few songs. Today’s songs were the Alphabet Song, The Muffin Man, and Apples and Bananas.
We start with math. Today we did lesson 15 of the Calvert Curriculum and this was a review day. I used the Singapore Math book (1A) that I am using as an addition to make sure that Dawn is grasping her lessons. Since I plan to stick with Singapore Math, I feel that it’s a good way to get her used to the process. She LOVES the colourful pages!
Today was a review day in Calvert Math, so we did some sheets in Singapore Math.
We worked on two pages, then turned our attention to reading comprehension. We read two books that we had previously read (Now I’m Big and Mice Squeak). We discussed some questions and talked about the sounds animals make.
Dawn turns the pages as we read.
While we were working on math, I started Emily out on cutting. She’s been playing and experimenting with using the scissors for the last couple of days, so I took a couple of thin strips from my Let’s Get Cutting worksheets and she had a blast snipping them apart.
Emily practices her cutting.
After that was reading readiness faturing the letter O. We used the song from the Talking Letter Factory to review the sound that O makes. After that, Dawn completed the two workbook pages in her Houghton Mifflin Parctice Book, relating to this letter.
Writing in the practice book
After this was phonemic awareness. Dawn is struggling in this area somewhat since she doesn’t completely grasp the idea of rhymes. We practiced rhyming words together but she remains unsure about what she’s supposed to be doing. Hopefully she’ll sort it out with continued pratice.
For the writing portion, we did a journal entry. I have a writing tablet that I use for her entries and they are very simple. On it, I write the date and a single sentence for her to trace over. Today’s entry was “Monday September 15, 2008. Emily is peeling the paper off the crayon.”
Emily removing paper from the crayons!
[/caption]All this took about an hour for us to get through and was the end of the Calvert work for the day. After that, I started Dawn on the Montessori pink level with the first object cards. This is the first step to her actually learning to read.
I pulled out the written words and asked her to pick one (pin). I placed it on the table in front of her along with the letters for the word and asked her to spell it out with the moveable alphabet. Once that was done, we sounded out the word together to figure out what it was (pin). I then took the word away and replaced it with the picture of a pin and asked her to put the word together by sounding it out.
Dawn's first wordbuilding experience!
She did it fairly easily and I repeated the task with the remaining five words (jug, car, nut, bag, net). Tomorrow I plan on repeating this activity, but to go directly with the pictures. I will make it more difficult as she progresses, then move on to a different object box. The idea behind this is to give her some confidence with words so she feels like she’s achieving something before moving to new words.
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