Monday - Changing Our Daily Plan

With homeschooling, it seems we are constantly evolving our methods. This weekend, I decided to make another change. We are going to concentrate on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic and then one extra subject per day. Of course, we're also doing our Bible study, but I'm trying to not think of this as school.

So, yesterday (Monday), we started out with a piano lesson. She was getting very frustrated with her lessons, so the past week or so I've been teaching her songs that she can memorize. I also bought some new curriculum and she picked out the theory book. I think this is going to work!

Anyway, we had a 30 minute lesson and she started learning a new Christmas song. When some family comes in a few weeks, we're going to have her first recital.

After piano, we had our Bible study. She is learning the books of the Bible and is almost finished! We are also reading through Genesis. We were reading about Noah's sons and all of their children. I told her not all parts of the Bible are exciting (but they're useful!), but we were excited to see, listed in Noah's descendents, a man named Egypt and a man named Akkad (a city we've studied about in SOTW). Lastly, we did her BSF study on Romans.

Then, we went to reading which today just consisted of phonics. On Monday's, we do a "Spelling Bee" and she did so well!!! Spelling has not been a real strong point for her, but she's getting much better! Then, we did the rest of our phonics lesson which was kind of a review lesson.

For writing, we each wrote a letter to my mom. Last week, she started writing letters for handwriting and she's really enjoying it. I think the people receiving the letters are, too! I only correct her sloppy letters, missing capital letters (or capital letters in the middle of a sentence) and her punctuation. We were going to do some reading, too, but I knew we were a little rushed for time.

Next was math. We start with what I call "Speedy Math" - timed worksheets covering addition. Some days she enjoys these, and some days she doesn't. Today was a "doesn't", but we got through it. Afterward, we worked on subtraction. We were working with a strategy for subtracting 9 or 8. She's been picking up on this pretty well.

After math we had lunch and then 3 friends came over, 2 brothers & a sister. We've never had them to our house to play before, and it went really well. The kids mainly played some board games and Wedgits.

Then was rest time - Alexandra watches a movie & I take a short nap.

Then, for this day, we were concentrating on astronomy. Today's reading was about the sun. We talked about solar flares & sun spots. We also talked about auroras, and I got on-line and found some photos & videos of them. Very neat! Lastly, we talked about light - about black light & white light & light waves. I thought it was still pretty confusing, so I'm going to try to find some books at the library.

After astronomy, I cooked dinner, we ate. I finished first, so I read to her from the Magic Tree House's "Space" book. And then it was off to our Bible Study.

We came home & talked & had dessert with Daddy. Then, we went to bed and read a chapter of Little House in the Big Woods. That book ties in so well with the Living History museum we went to last week. We didn't turn off the lights until about 10:05, but we had a great day!