Homeschooling Begins

 This was a BIG week for us! As you can tell from the title, Homeschooling officially began this week. We are using the Calvert curriculum. Dallas was taught on that and many other homeschooling families I know have used that and had nothing but praise to give to the program. So, to be honest... I didn't even really shop around. I attended a webinar a couple months back and the next day I bought the Pre-K bundle. I've been waiting to finish up the boys their little table and chair set you see here in these pictures before we started. 

Ideally, I want to build a little classroom/schoolhouse playhouse for us to set up like a real classroom, but we have to wait for the funding to kick in for that one :) Above you see everything that came in the box from Calvert. I was like a kid at Christmas looking through all of this stuff. So exciting!! As you can tell from Joss' expression below...he was pretty excited too :) 

 These first couple of days (and I have a feeling months) we have been trying to get a routine established and the structure down. Some mornings Dallas has taken Emit out of the house for a little bit so it can be Joss and me alone, and a few mornings it has been the boys and me. It is definitely easier to just work with Joss, but I have a feeling the more routine it all becomes the better we will all get at it.   

 These first few days we have been learning IN and OUT, BEFORE and AFTER, LEFT and RIGHT, the color red...things along those lines. Joss has surprised me every single day so far with something he knows or remembers or how quickly he picks up on something. It is truly amazing to see it in the early stages! He has taken a sudden liking to coloring and drawing that he never really had before. He liked it before but only at 5 minutes at a time or something like that. We sat the first day for about 20 minutes straight and colored on this picture above with animals IN and OUT of things. Joss really responds to praise. The more enthusiastic I am with it, the bigger of a deal it is to him to do it again to make me proud of him. I think one thing I may struggle with the most is wanting to capture it all with videos or pictures, but realizing too that those could be a distraction and there will be times when I need to leave my camera alone. Maybe Daddy can find a way to sneak some footage in from time to time. 

After so much hard work, we have to play hard too :) 

 I've been working on a couple projects the last couple weeks. I finally finished up my little table and chairs for the boys (above). It has a glass top that I had planned for it, but it shattered in my hands as I was placing it on top of the table as the final step. So, I guess it wasn't meant to be on there for now. Another project I've been anxious to do, since I bought this glider below, is cover it with a different fabric. I'm sorry, but beige/cream colored stuff just isn't going to work in my house. Not at this stage of life. While I was ordering fabric for our new couch (project to come) I found this teal fabric below and thought it would be perfect. 

It is a far-from-perfect upholstery job, but I like it MUCH better. Joss seemed to give it his approval too :) And this last little one below was an idea I got off Pinterest a while ago. I got some new earrings on our trip to the states, so I thought this would be a great time for a new holder. 

We just finished our first full week of the P90X workout. I'm sore, but feel very good about the work we've put in so far. I love that Dallas and I are doing it together because it is much easier to get motivated when we have each other. We're working our tails off and hoping to post our BEFORE pictures at the end if we get some good AFTER results :) 

PS- Don't worry CC, I'm still catching up on the other posts and just about to start on our stuff from the trip to Bama!