My kids sleep has been HORRIBLE the past 2 weeks and it is catching up with me. Almost every night I have been up between 2-4 hours with one or both my kids. We have had teething and sleep regressions and who knows what. And for half that time my husband was out of town. I stayed with my in-laws then my mom came to town to help but in the middle of the night it was all me. I am so tired and so frustrated. One day we will get back to normal…….I hope…….please.
Our first year of homeschooling is coming to an end. I loved almost every minute of it lol. Overall, my toddler did amazing with the curriculum. With a year under my belt now I kind of know how he learns and how he does things. So I will review the curriculum that we used for preschool and in a couple weeks I’ll post what we’re going to do for Pre-K.
We started this about 2/3rds of the way through the year and will be continuing it through pre-K. These are much more lesson like so we tend to break them up into smaller sections but I have become a big fan of the Good and the Beautiful.
I didn’t like this at all and neither did my toddler. We found it to be very dry and boring. I wasn’t going to make either of us suffer through it after I decided we didn’t like it. We got about halfway through it then I chucked it in the recycling bin.
Farm land math from Timberdoodle
My son loved this in the beginning and even asked for it regularly to play it. However once his new little sister was big enough to start taking pieces it started turning into a battle so we set this aside as well. But, it did lay a great foundation for us.
Also from Timberdoodle
This was fantastic. Timberdoodle actually added this in their 2023-2024 preschool curriculum kit so I only ordered it about 2 months ago but we are almost done with it. If you do it weekly it is not a full year’s worth of curriculum but it has added a little bit of math back into our study.
Another one that my toddler and I thought was really boring and dry. Just like the math we got about halfway through the book and I chucked it.
History and social studies
Love this puzzle, it is super adorable. For a long time my toddler had little to no interest in doing anything except jumping on the pieces to get them together when I set them in the correct place. But in the last 6 weeks that has started to change, with me helping him identify which pieces go where he is assembling it entirely himself. I thought this book was super cool and interesting, my toddler generally just tolerated it lol. We did not finish it. I might throw it in here and there in our pre-K unit and see if he likes it better.
Nature and science
Love, love, love this. This curriculum is meant to be used year after year after year layering in more information and learning each year. Right now we keep it very basic but I look forward to using it for years to come with the kids. This is really great for kids that aren’t ready for a full curriculum. We started with this entire program which is made of units. Now we use it mainly for it’s great book lists as well as a science project here and there.
Art
Eh, super cute idea but my toddler was just kind of meh about it. Maybe he’ll become more artistic in the future (though I’m not sooooo….I wish I was but was not blessed in that area)
Skills
This was great in the beginning of the year to get my son interested in learning to use scissors but we didn’t finish it because once he semi knew what he was doing he wanted to do his own cutting lol.
Overall, it was a great year. I loved watching my son grow in leaps and bounds. Which is exactly how it came. He would not get something and suddenly it would click. He was really did go in leaps and bounds and stops and starts.
The great thing about homeschooling his preschool is I was really able to follow his rhythm and our rhythm as a family. There were weeks where we didn’t do anything. We kind of fell out of our rhythm and then we’d pick it back up and have a couple of great weeks, couple great months and then kind of fall off again which worked out great for us. We’re still finishing on time and I just love the entire experience.
We started a little before he returned 2 years old. So it was by no means always easy sunshine but it was rewarding and wonderful. Occasionally I did resort to a little bit of bribery or coercion sort of to get him to come over and start. Once he started. He usually loved everything. But it would occasionally be oh. Can you help Mommy do this? Or do you want to come eat a chip with me while we look at this picture and talk about it? Lol.
This book was so fantastic. It gave so many options and ideas to add creativity to your homeschooling. Take away some of the pressure and add confidence in yourself.
It talks about a lot of different versions of homeschooling, a lot of different options. It gives lots of encouragement and really just is an amazing resource. I checked this out of the library but I fully intend to buy it. Actually. I asked my best friend to give it to me for Christmas lol.
But it’s not just for homeschooling parents. In my opinion. I think it’s really just any family or parents who want to enhance their child’s learning and life. This book will really give you ideas and ways to embrace the spontaneous love of learning kids have.
I put on some Nat Geo in the morning while we all relaxed and woke up
I read them a book from the construction unit we are doing from playing preschool
We talked about the date, weather, season, the months of the year and the days of the week
We did some stickers in our math sticker book
And of course we couldn’t leave my 15 month old out of it lol. They played a little in the sink Daddy came out for lunch to play Then he had a meltdown and rage colored lolI actually did my hair (don’t look at the post partum flyaways lol) and put some mascara onWe hit the library and I got way too many books for me hahahaNap walk. This is how I get them both to take a nap currently Did some worksheet pagesAttempted our first teatime……..ummmmm id call it a half success. He had a huge tantrum (he had a hard toddler day) but we did get 3 short sections and 1 longer section read in the preschooler bookGot a Good and the Beautiful lesson done.
The longer my mileage gets the less I want to press play on any kind of strength training. I need to start finding shorter strength workouts as my mileage increases. I can go back to 30 minutes strength workouts after the marathon.
Thursday – 3 miles
Friday – 2 miles – these were hot miles right in the middle of the day while I got the kids tonight from the stroller.
It has been a very weird late spring/early summer for us here in the Pacific Northwest. Spring stayed cold and wet later than the last few years then once summer hit, boom! We have been in the mid 80s- high 90s since then.
My watermelon is staying alive but barely growingI finally put chicken netting around this area and it’s not growing. Broccoli, carrots, bell peppers and a lone surviving pumpkin plant.My pumpkins are the only plants that are thriving. But the chickens have started digging so I might be harvesting them a bit early. We will see. We have some volunteer cherry tomato plants amid the weedsRaspberries My 2 lone survivor garlicSalsa gardenBeefsteak tomatoesVersion of a Roma tomatoMy basil is doing amazingJalapenos, with cilantro behind it and cucumbers to the side of it.
We have four chickens and on average we get 2 to 3 eggs a day. One of them was injured last year so I don’t think she lays anymore.
We have a fig tree out front that’s doing well and a small little container of strawberries that we’ve eaten. Maybe two of us because my son picked some early and birds have gotten the others.
We took a quick overnight trip to the coast to spend some time with friends and see the kite festival. This was my first time going to the kite festival…….and will probably be my last hahahaha. The kites were cool but I found it pretty lackluster as far as a festival goes.
It will go down as a good memory and I’m glad we did it but it was absolutely not our best executed trip hahaha. We had a fair few tantrums.
The kids napped on the way there.
We played on the beach until we had access to the AirBnB we were going to share with friends
The house was right on the beach and had a great view
We can’t go anywhere without injuries hahahaha
After an early afternoon of playing on the beach and walking around we played on the rental houses deck and ordered a pizza
Little man slept in a big boy bunk bed!!!
Sleeping was absolutely terrible. The room was facing west so we had the sunset which in Oregon is not until 9:30 with full darkness, not until about 10: 30pm and while he doesn’t sleep in a completely dark room, it’s a pretty dark room so it took him forever to fall asleep. He did not go to sleep until about 10: 15 p.m.
Then the casino about a mile and a half away had fireworks and some drunken neighbors decided to sing along to them, thankfully this did not wake either kid up. Then at 11:45 p.m. drunken people on the beach set off a huge fireworks that lit up the entire room for about 30 minutes which woke the baby up.
The next morning was a slow leisurely morning (I ordered Starbucks through door dash because I could not keep my eyes open). Little man woke us all up at 5:30am We had breakfast with the whole house then played on the very windy beach.
There were lots of tantrums a long the way hahahahCheese!!!We went through so many outfits with the sand and water hahahahhaha
My friend and her family were in the house with us too. The babies played together a bit
Then it was time for us to pack up and head home!
Both kids were asleep within about 15min of leaving and slept pretty much the whole way home.
It was an absolutely exhausting trip and I’m still exhausted today even after going to sleep an hour early, but I’m glad we did it. I’m going to try and go to sleep early again tonight
I skipped through a lot of this book. Just sort of reading some of the section headings and a few sentences here and there. I thought it was pretty dry. But that could be because a lot of the information I feel like I already read in “There’s no such thing as bad weather”.
But there was a lot of good information and some very interesting things. I found it really interesting where they talked about how many teachers now have to tell kids no to so many things on the playground that they can’t do anything during recess. There was a teacher in New Zealand who decided to get rid of all the rules for recess and just let the kids go wild like they used to and they saw a bullying go down, concentration go up, etc
Another thing that was really interesting and I saw translated to our real life is talking about how kids used to play in the early 1900s and even late 90s and how strong the kids were because they weren’t restricted to what they could do on playgrounds or at recess and they were climbing on top of things, around things, swinging, and going crazy. I actually had a mom in my son’s gymnastics class, be somewhat amazed at how strong my son is. And how his gross motor skills are so well developed for a two and a half year old. And I think that’s because we don’t restrict his play. We let him climb on things we let him run around. We let him be crazy. We try and do it as safely as possible but we do not restrict or overly helicopter parent.
I do see how in America we have become more and more restrictive on what we deem safe for our children. And as a mom, I absolutely understand that it’s a balance between raining in my own fear and keeping them safe. We’ve also become a very litigious society which makes it so difficult for caregivers to give children that freedom to be children and run around and climb and jump and bounce and be crazy.
It’s overall I found it to be a very dry book and I skipped and jumped through a lot of it. But I think it’s definitely worth parents taking a peek at it and maybe doing the same kind of skipping, jumping, and stopping and reading where you are interested and skipping the parts that you find boring or redundant.
Trailing the blonde 