The more I try...

Things have been sooo stressful around here.  Lil Man is doing FANTASTIC with his school work so far.  He is loving Easy Peasy's curriculum, which we are using the Getting Ready 2.  He has a lesson from the McGuffey's First Reader a day, learns a capital letter to write from a hooked on phonics video a day, and then we do SOTW.  He is really enjoying it.  Sophie on the other hand... ugh.  The Easy Peasy 5th grade curriculum was proving too hard.  The language arts is focused on poetry that year, which was just too much for her.  She has a very literal mind, and doesn't understand how poetry compares things (i.e. My love is like rose blah blah blah).  She was getting more and more frustrated with it and herself, which is not our style at all.  So, we went back and started over at Day One with Easy Peasy 4th grade.  It uses McGuffey's Third Reader, which I do like.  It is building vocabulary and helping her with writing skills.  So I refuse to complain.

Math remains ambiguous for us.  I do NOT like Easy Peasy's math curriculum ideas.  Sophie doesn't respond well to the "Watch a video, answer questions" at all.  And Lil Man has me stumped as to what to teach.  He needs to learn how to write numbers and recognize larger numbers in their written form.  But he is well beyond Kindergarten arithmetic.  He can add, subtract, and even understands multiplication and division MENTALLY.  As soon as you write an equation down, he's lost.  I may just grab them some workbooks from the Parent-Teacher Store and call it a day haha.

Every time I turn around, I'm drawn more and more towards unschooling.  Obviously its a win-win for the kids, as they're just living life like always.  The only problem is ME.  I feel like they need to be doing some sort of traditional stuff for it to be school, even though I've read over and over that it isn't necessary.  Unschooling does work.  And I've proved it to myself that it works for my kids.  Why can't I just let it be a that?  Ugh.

School's Back IN!!!

Its August, and in West Virginia, that means SCHOOL TIME.  I'm mad at myself for not blogging during the summer, but we were B-U-S-Y.  Between going out on the boat, walks, mini-vacas, and the like, I just didn't have time.  But this school year I am making blogging a "Monday Activity".

I have everything we will be doing this year all ready.  I'm using Easy Peasy for math and language arts for both the kids, at least in the beginning.  I was going to buy Life of Fred for math, but its a HUGE investment, so I'm torn.  I like Easy Peasy for K language arts because it uses McGuffey readers, which is much better than phonics in my opinion.  We will be using Story of the World Vol 1 for S.S, for both, and I am getting a Human Body book and activity books off Amazon for Sophie.  We will adapting those lessons for Gary.  I'm pretty excited :)

We were using Netflix a lot as a supplemental resource, but we aren't getting it anymore (booooo) so I'm looking for new ways to integrate that kind of learning.  I'm thinking that we will be using YouTube a LOT this year.  Gary especially learns so much better when its visual like that.

So that's our game plan, folks.  I'm going to slowly start the kids back into "School mode" if you will, since its still so nice out.  I don't see us doing anything super big until after Labor Day at least.  Not that we are a "nose to the grindstone" type of group anyway haha.

Have fun everyone!!!!