Homeschool Open House 2007

I found the Homeschool Open House on Tiany's blog.  So here's a little about me - I have been married for nine years to a great man.  We have three precious girls ages 7, 5, and 2.  This will be our 4th official year homeschooling.  It is such a blessing to know that my girls do not have to get up and leave early in the mornings.  Having them home is peace and, I believe, the way God intended it to be. 

A typical school day in our house is changing this year.  Last year Lil would sleep for 3-4 hours at a time.  We would do most if not all of our school work while she was asleep.  Now that she is 2 1/2, she sleeps a lot less.  She will be up for the bulk of school this year.  My plan is to get up between 6:30-7:00am to have my time with the Lord before the girls wake up.  I am going to get them an alarm and wake them up at 8am.  Then we can eat breakfast, get ready and do chores.  Bible time will be first with all three girls.  Then as I am doing math, phonics and language arts with Lulu, Monkey will be doing activity bags or something else to keep Lil occupied.  When Lulu is finished, Monkey will do her work while Lulu occupies Lil.  After lunch Lil will go down for her nap and the other two will do (one designated days, not all of these every day) history, science, art, music, unit studies, and whatever else comes up.

I previously posted about what curriculum we will be using this year.  You can look at it here. 

I do not schedule our day to the minute.  We have too much that changes around here.  But I am going to try to be more disciplined with our start time this year.  That is where the alarm comes in for the girls.  They are excited about having it too.  I think if they can get used to getting up, dressing, brushing teeth, etc. when the alarm goes off it will help with a lot of the slow-moving.  I am very flexible too if we do not get something done in the day that I intend for us to.  There is always another day....  Homeschooling provides us with so many freedoms.  I personally enjoy taking advantage of them.

We do the majority of our school work in our school room.   We have a small house and five people can really acquire a lot of junk  stuff.  Toward the end of last school year we decided to put all three girls in one bedroom and turn the smaller bedroom into our school room.  This has helped tremendously with the appearance of the rest of our house.  The girls also like that all of their materials are in one place and easy to get to.  We will read on the couch or on my bed.  But before they did their work at the kitchen table after we lugged books, notebooks, art supplies, pencils and all our other stuff to the kitchen.  Much better the new way!

I hope you have enjoyed a look at Potter's Hand Academy.  Make sure you visit the other blogs too.  So far the response has been great.