My First Homeschool Planner

Yesterday I had a great day for homeschool planning. I visited the local garden center and came home with a large planter and a packet of sunflower seeds. I just need to buy enough potting soil, and we'll be able to plant flowers together. I am very excited about this project!

After the garden center, I made a quick stop at Target and bought my very first homeschool planner. It's a typical student planner with monthly and weekly layout pages. It's pretty too, with a trendy blue and green chrysanthemum pattern on the cover. Lately I've had too many ideas for just the sticky note program on my smartphone. And given the way that our homeschool revolves around the seasons, I like being able to plan with a calendar in front of me.

I mostly want to use my "planner" as a record book, to write down after the fact what we did on a given day. It gives me another way to reflect, come up with more ideas, and correct imbalances. I can see, for example, if it's been way too long since we got to the playground. Although I have gotten plenty of things for Ladybug's education lately (like sunflower seeds), I kept coming back to the idea of a set of matching cards/tiles to play memory. I couldn't figure out why my brain refused to let go of this idea, or leave it for another time. Then, after jotting notes in the planner, I realized that the memory game is the next math activity, and there hasn't been much new in that subject lately. So I quit fussing over it and just bought the game. The planner helps me make decisions and clarify my thinking.

Something about having this first planning book, which begins its dated pages July 2013, makes me feel like I just officially signed up to homeschool preschool. 2.9 - 3 seems to be a magic age for preschool entry, as well as readiness for so many fun activities it's overwhelming. I think that's why I intuitively reached for my planning book around now. There's so much to choose from, yet some days are filled with illness, bad weather, and tons of TV. When I get down about these times, it really helps my mood to have a record of the big picture, in brief notes about how we spent our time.

The cover of the planner reads "2013 // 2014," and with those tiny dates it creates a school year. A host of holidays, Ladybug's 3rd birthday, rotating seasons that will wind up somewhere in summer 2014. However we fill the time, it will be her first year of preschool, and -- it's official -- we're doing it together at home.

Early Spring: Puddles, Chickens, & Baby Goats

Receding snow at our nearby park

My friend said it very well today: "It's cold, but it's spring cold." Not so bitter and bone-chilling. There's more light and longer days. The two feet of snow from our blizzard has almost melted away, and when I walk outside I can smell mud and new grass. Yes!

Getting in some serious puddle time.

Last week Ladybug was in no mood to participate in farm class, which was not her fault. We'd just had a pretty miserable slog through a lot of snow, trying to walk from the train station to the farm. What was normally a ten minute walk took an hour. Yuck. So when we did get to the farm, we warmed up in a side room, reading books about insects and sheep. Then Ladybug played in puddles, and we got to see two foxes! I was more excited about the foxes than she was. Her favorite was a rabbit burrowed in a little hole. 


I mentioned in this post that I went a little overboard on winter books. This week I returned most of the forty picture books I had borrowed from the library for Valentine's and winter. I checked out a much smaller number of springtime titles. One of them is Big Fat Hen by Keith Baker. It's basically the classic "One, two, buckle my shoe" rhyme, with a little added fun at the end when all the hen's friends show up and hatch their chicks. Ladybug has also learned "Los Pollitos Dicen," a traditional Spanish children's song about a mother hen and her baby chicks.

All this reading and singing is why I was very excited that farm school this week would feature chickens! And the great part is we made it to class, with Bug in a good mood, so she got to enjoy seeing them. We even got a special peek at the "Employees Only" room where all the baby chicks live in their incubators.

    

After the visit to the poultry house, we saw three baby goats who were just days old. Ladybug explained, "The baby goats are asleep next to their mother!" Yep.

The little pile of three sleeping baby goats.

I'm so glad spring is finally here.