Homeschool (preschool) pt. 1

Ok, this is for Claire and the other who have asked what we're doin'- I'll start with how we got started and then go from there:)

Gather some info:
CB libary has a whole bunch of books about homeschooling, so when I was pregnant with Sam I read about it a lot. Basically, there are tons of ways you can go about it, so you gotta kind of match your homeschoool style with your kid (age, personality, ability and interests) and what you the parent/teacher can actually pull off with limited amounts of time, money, patience.
I would recommend reading a book or two about it if you are interested, but that is one of my favorite ways to learn, so if you would prefer interviewing other homeschooling families there seem to be more and more of those around these days. I ended up asking my friend Heather a lot of questions too because her son is slightly older than my oldest and our boys have many similarities.

Start to Plan:
You need to have a few objectives in mind when you start I think and you can define these as formally or informally as you want. My husband and I talked about our goals for our kids- eveything from common sense to cooking to addition to manners to prayer. We looked at lists found online about normal things kids at this stage learn and started with that, but I planned on leaning more toward Matt's interest-directed learning as we got better with the basics. So what this looked like for us is checking the lists (I will find a link for you soon) and finding materials that I liked and that I thought Matt would receive well to present the information to him.

Materials:
tbc...

Why the heck am I blogging, anyway?

Why?

I have been wanting to sit down and do this for ages.
I told Andrea I would.
There are fun things I would love to share with other people.
There are challenging, thought/prayer provoking things I would love to share with other people.
I want to keep the "writing" part of my brain semi-coherent.
I just don't have anything better to do with my time. OK, that is not true! I am actually crazy-busy and this blog will prolly be low on the priority list above feeding and clothing my family:)

Speaking of feeding and clothing, I appreciate creativity, a lot, but I also realize there is a special kind of beauty in something that serves the purpose it was created for, so I will write some very practical stuff about house and family. You can expect to find reviews, tips, healthy recipes, frugal ideas, etc. here as well as me trying to figure out stuff about God. I really value the Bible, so I will be quoting that a bunch too. There you have it.

This is my life. I'm alive in Christ and I am living in God's love.
Amy