September Homeschooling Adventures

As we quickly decided to homeschool Keira for Kindergarten, I wasn't sure what to expect.  Elijah was enrolled in Connections Academy, an online public school.  And, I had decided to homeschool Keira for Kindergarten myself.  Fortunately, I found all sorts of reasons that homeschooling two of them turned out to be more rewarding and more fun than I had imagined.

One of my favorite by products of homeschooling both of them has been their relationship.  They are truly best friends now and play together all the time.  Before this year, they didn't naturally play together, they would often play separately or ask Scott or I to play with them.  Now, they naturally gravitate to each other and really enjoy each other.  It is fabulous.  One silly game they made up in September was burying each other in as many blankets and pillows they could find.  Then, they wanted to pose with their creations before their sibling emerged from their pillow and blanket mountain.

As for homeschooling Keira for Kindergarten, it's been an easy, fun year for us both.  She's now reading, writing and doing awesome in math, too.  One of Keira's favorite things to do all year has been writing in her journal.  Here are some of the first pictures that she drew in her journal.  She was so proud of them she photographed them herself.

Her creativity has helped me to teach her to write, since she's always eager to draw and write about her drawings.  But, it's even helped me to teach her math, too.  I taught her all about money by playing an elaborate game of "Store."  I taught her how to tell time by play acting an entire day including waking up, eating play food (which she prepared for me) and going to sleep again, all while she programmed a play clock to read the time each event was occurring.  Also, she loves playing with math manipulatives.  One day, she made people out of place value blocks and I was able to teach her about counting and place value when we put them away.

Another awesome element to this school year is that Keira often ends up working on a version of whatever Elijah's doing.  In September, that worked especially well in art.  One afternoon, Elijah had to do some painting for Connections.  I decided to give the kids the primary colors and up the painting lesson to include color mixing and have Keira join in as well.  It was awesome, they sat at the table for a long time happily mixing colors, admiring each others' colors and sharing their methods.  From then on, most art lessons became paired color mixing painting lessons.

Besides painting, Keira also decided to do yoga with Elijah when he was doing it for P.E.  And, as you can see, they left plenty of room between them for me.  I'll never give up an opportunity to do yoga, especially if it's with my babies.  I love being able to spend my days with both of them.