Joy in the Homeschooling Journey

As you know, I retired after thirty years of teaching this past May.  What you might not know is that I have the most wonderful opportunity of helping my daughter and son-in-law homeschool my grandson.  We officially started this past Monday, although we have had many days of classroom fun during the last several months.  Today, I want to share some pictures with you of our first day.

I have sixteen years of experience in teaching kindergarten.  What I do not have experience in is homeschooling.  However, I know what I want it to look and feel like. Even more importantly, I know what I do NOT want it to be.  I am extremely comfortable taking care of my own curriculum.  I am extremely comfortable not using a ton of workbooks or a computer program to teach my dear grandson.  Instead, you will find us playing, creating, and having FUN as I help him learn everything (and more) that he needs to learn.

Here is the sign on our door.  We both claim ownership of this very special place.

I added new shelves found at Walmart for only $15 each and baskets I had previously purchased for my classroom.

We begin each class session with the pledge and Bible study.

We made Mommy and Daddy a special keepsake on the first day of school.  I found this for free on Teachers Pay Teachers.  You can find it here.

We do calendar work, check the weather, and learn about shapes each morning.

We won't be doing a ton of worksheets in our classroom.  I don't believe in using them just for the sake of using them, but cutting and gluing are important skills.  

We used colored popsicle sticks that I added magnets to for visual discrimination and building the same shape.

We played a fun board game for social studies about the neighborhood.  Board games are so much fun.  Playing them doesn't even seem like learning!

We won't be using a curriculum that has him learning strictly online.  However, we will be watching some videos.  This one was a science video from YouTube about living and nonliving things.

We worked on some CVC words by sounding out the words, building the words with blocks, and then writing the words.

There is so much learning with this probability game I made.  We worked on predicting, less than, more than, sizes, and more!

I could go on and on about the many things that could be learned from this simple puzzle I purchased at the Dollar Tree.  It's my favorite place to shop!  

Do you want to learn more about homeschooling your child without a purchased curriculum?  Find full details at my homeschooling Facebook page, "Fun Learning with Grammy."

Homeschooling my grandson is DEFINITELY... 

My Kind of Teaching!!