We are a little more than half way through our reading series with Sonlight for the year. I feel content with where Zoe is at in her reading. I am working on fluency but I think she has a good understanding of basic letter sounds, and for the most part can sound out unfamiliar words quite well. I'm looking forward to when she can just grab any book of the book shelf and read it to us.

Snow Day!

Another reason to love homeschooling. While most of our surrounding school districts were

in school today, we made snowmen, had a great snow ball fight, then followed it up with hot chocolate and a valentine craft!

Free Art

Art is not something we do too often, but I'm trying really hard to incorporate it more into our school time. It was always one of my favorite things to do in school, and I don't want our children to miss out. They asked to paint one afternoon after school time, and although I was hesitant do to my dislike of messes :) I decided why not? So we got it all out and let them go at it.

Revamping

I made today my "teacher work day." We woke up and right from the start everything started going wrong, the children seemed out of control, I was cranky, I couldn't find several things I was looking for and at that point- I felt beat and made the executive decision to take the day off and revamp our set up. I would like to believe that those who have been homeschooling a little longer than me have struggled a little with some of my issues. Although I have loved homeschooling thus far, I have struggled much with the balance of life and getting school done and I needed a moment to just breath and think through what wasn't working. We have been having schooltime in our playroom which has been working well, but because of the set up, I was keeping all my teacher materials and manipulatives in various places throughout the house. I was fed up with trying to keep track of where things were so I spent the morning moving things around, sorting and cleaning. It was a good feeling when all was done. I feel ready to have some really good productive days that will begin and end with organization that I didn't have before. I really believe that my lack of organization in most areas of my life are why I can't seem to really get control of things around here and why I get easily frustrated. I am going to work on putting a few things in place in the next couple days/weeks that will help me in this area.