Our Home Schooling Intro

When I started the blog, I had said I'd talk about homeschooling L, and I realized with the exception of a few bits here and there about him spelling, I really haven't.

Up until fairly recently, we've taken sort of an unschool-y approach. L is quite young, and I wanted him to just play and be a little kid. We took care to surround him with lots of (too many?) toys, puzzles, books, movies, and art supplies. Then we mostly just let him do whatever he wanted. We don't limit tv watching generally, but he's only allowed to watch things we approve of, and most of his choices are at least somewhat educational.

When he got interested in something, we tried to help him learn more about it. He'll be 4 in may, and by following this premise, he's learned a great deal about trains, letters and reading, some Spanish, and a whole list of other things. He has an enormous vocabulary, and tells me his sister is disgraceful. Ha Ha.

For the last few months, I've been trying to implement a few more mom directed activities. We work in workbooks, which he surprisingly loves. I get sick of them way before he does. We're playing games like Boggle Jr. We recently made a lapbook about trains. I'm trying to introduce him to more art projects, which can be hard because of his sensory issues. We're starting to try to read the preschool BOB books. We do all these things when he's in the mood, and stop when he's tired of them or gets too distracted.

After his birthday, we are officially going to begin using the Bright Beginnings curriculum for preschoolers. I'm going to tweak it some, but I like that it's basically all inclusive, and requires a minimum of prep time.

According to the literature I've seen, L is somewhere between a preschooler and a kindergartner on most academic skills. He is somewhat behind on some social and self care issues. This makes sense to me because he is and always has been a little immature. I'm convinced he'll catch up eventually, and in the meantime, we're going to work on those things a little more intensely.

So anyway, that's sort of our home school intro, I guess. I'll try to start posting more about what we're up to, but for now things are pretty relaxed and unstructured. Some days we do "educational" stuff all day. Some days we don't do much at all.