Starting in Homeschooling

We have started more formal homeschooling in our house.

It most certainly helps that Baby Pear has developed a consistent napping routine at 9, 12:30 and usually 4ish. ~~~~happy dance~~~~

Our first step was to get ourselves back into a reliable morning Bible reading routine with the girls. It is not fancy, but it works. We eat breakfast, I feed Baby cereal while Miss Pear colors at the table, then I clean up Baby and give her something to play with in her highchair while I read first Five Minute Devotions for Children: Celebrating God's World As a Family and then our Bible chapter for the day. I do start with a devotional book because I find that when I am reading I just need a little something to focus my heart and still my brain, so I would rather the girls miss part of the devotion due to lack of attention than part of the Bible reading. We decided to skip to Matthew this week and are planning on reading our way through the Gospels.

And while this may make me a horrible mom, we were having trouble with not interrupting the Bible reading for silly things, so now, when Miss Pear sits through the whole reading without interrupting I reward her with a sticker. It works, and once she can do this consistently I will show her the last sheet of stickers that will be rewards and once the are gone, this will be behavior that is just expected, not rewarded.

While I don't count Bible reading as homeschooling, but rather something our family does out of our love for God, I do keep track of it in the homeschooling book just so that I can see what we did and when. It is also something we felt needed to get on track before we tackled anything else as it is the most important in our view.

Our second step was to get a morning schedule going so that it would work and not be a lesson in craziness!

So our loose schedule is:

1. Wake up, cleaned up
2. Breakfast
3. Bible Reading
4. Read Aloud and play if there is time or while I am reading a book without lots of pictures.
5. Baby Pear for her nap, Miss Pear 1/2 hour television while I accomplish this (and I am looking to cut this TV out over time).
6. While Baby naps we start our schooling and often get through a fair bit of it.
7. Baby wakes up and nurses (Miss Pear plays or colors)
8. We all go back downstairs and either finish up where we were in schooling, do some house stuff (Miss Pear helps/plays as applicable and Baby plays while I talk to her about what I am doing), or read.
9. Lunch
10. Naps all around (Mommy too for a short break).

After naps it is still a hodge podge of getting supper ready, finishing any schooling that did not get done, housework, play time for the girls etc. But with the morning plan in place we get the bulk of what we want to get done accomplished. Hopefully as we progress a reasonable afternoon plan will develop too.