Lots of friends have expressed a desire to know what our day looks like or how we structure our homeschool day around here, so I decided to document a day! :) It was much more fun than I expected it to be, I'm happy to report. ha! :) The only thing that wasn't fun about it was that I DROPPED my camera on the floor and broke the door off the slot that holds the memory card. Not a good thing being that it's my main camera. :/ The good news is that it's probably time for it to be serviced anyway so now I have a really great reason to take it in.

Back to business... Every day starts the same around here. Emma gets her charts off the hook and immediately she looks to see what today holds for her. She loves this part. :) We do our subjects in order and as she completes each one, she turns it over. Very tangible. I mentioned this in my last blog and also linked to where I got the idea and the template for making our daily activities. So please refer to that blog if you'd like these charts! :)

She then goes into her drawer where I've stored all her work for the day. She also loves this part... especially when it includes a craft! :)

The first thing we always do is calendar. We talk about the day, the month, year... all that and she writes it on the board in long and short form. Being that we do this everyday she just goes right to the board after she's reviewed her work for the day and does this part automatically. It's great.

Then she has "warm-up" work she does everyday. This is always a short language lesson and a short math lesson. Then on alternating days it's either also a critical thinking activity or a short science lesson. This is another thing we do every day.

This is just how I organize our lessons, in case anyone would like to know. :) I made these charts in Pages, so they're super basic, but it really helps to outline our day each day. We don't do every single subject everyday so the chart on the right just helps me to keep track of what subjects are covered on which days. If any homeschool moms out there would like a copy of my charts, please just email me @ graciejamesphotography@gmail.com and I will gladly email you my planning charts.

The abacus has truly been one of my best purchases yet. We use it every. single. day. in math. Emma loves to use it and I love seeing her use it! :)

While Emma is working on her independent warm-up work, I get Noah started on activities that are very age appropriate for a 3 year old. He mostly does puzzles and fine motor skill activities. He loves them and they are quick so he can move from activity to activity pretty quickly. Because of this, I have a lot of different manipulatives for him so he doesn't get bored and he always has something else to move on to as soon as he's finished with the current thing.

One of the many, many things I love about homeschooling is that Emma gets immediate feedback. She doesn't have to have her paper collected and then wait a few hours or until the next day to get feedback on the work she just did. We discuss every single assignment she does in depth during and immediately following her working time. It's great.

Emma's journal is truly my favorite thing that we do. I found this journal at a really great bookstore at the beach this past summer. I had no idea homeschooling was in our very near future when I bought it, I just knew it was something I really wanted Emma to do. Now I intend to buy them for all my children and I hope so much I can find new ones for them to fill out each year. Stuff like this is so special to me and I know that as she grows, I will love so much looking back over the years and reading her journal writings.

And each time I get Emma busy on her current assignment, I turn to Noah who is always on the floor near me. He prefers that to sitting at his desk. :) And I get him going on something new and different.

Today Emma's journal entry was for her to write about her mom and her dad. She is such a sweet girl and it made tears well up in my eyes to read what she wrote. The second thing she wrote about her dad was how much she misses him when he's at work. :( Thank goodness he's coming home to us next week, because these babies are really missing him!! :)

After journaling, it was time for Emma to have some hands on learning time too. Today she chose to work with her connecting beads, which aren't really a "learning" toy, but I let it slide. She has to watch her brother playing as he learns all day, so I try to let her work with a manipulative of her choice when it's that time of day for her. Today she chose her snap beads.

And she made me some very beautiful jewelry. ;)

Noah working with his pipe connectors...

Math time!! Today's lesson focus was Equal To and Not Equal To...

We do use the Horizons Math Curriculum by Alpha Omega, which I really love and it works well for her. It is a spiraling curriculum, which I was hesitant about, but so far it's working out for us. I'm going to do a post on our curriculum on a different day, so I'll move on... :)

Then it was craft time. Today was just a wood coloring project of a pilgrim. I love AC Moore and their holiday themed dollar crafts for kids. They're great and my kids love them!

I've posted a few pictures of Emma doing this, but we do practice our Spelling words like this daily...

Reading time.... During reading, we do a phonics lesson, then I read a book of her choosing to her, followed by her reading a book of her choosing to me. While she's reading to me, I make flash cards of the words she struggles with and I use those for drilling purposes each day. She also fills out a reading log each day with the books that she reads to me.

Then it was time for a learning game! This is a new learning game for Emma called SepToys. Very, very cool and very, very HARD game! I was disturbed to find that I could not for the life of me figure it out, yet my first grader totally loved it and was engrossed in it within minutes! I was horrible at Geometry in school, though, so I can understand why it was difficult for me, I just was blown away by how taken Emma was with it. Smart girl!! :)

If you look at the picture to the far left closely, you'll notice big fat crocodile tears on Noah's cheeks. I broke his heart by not letting him destroy Emma's geometric creations (above) and instead making him play an age appropriate learning game for him. He was only sad for about 30 seconds though and then he discovered he loved finding the letters to make these words!! :)

So, there ya go, folks! A day in our homeschool life. Everyday looks completely different for us, though, as the only things we do every single day are calendar, warm-ups, math, and reading. Everything else is done sporadically spaced throughout the week. We love it this way and it is the best thing that's happened to us! I'd love any questions or comments. I hope I didn't ramble too much, but I figured it'd be easier to blog it out this way rather than to try and lay out what we do for a lot of different friends in emails. :)

I think the main hold back for Tony and I on going ahead with homeschooling when Emma was first ready to start school was the socialization angle. It was such a silly thing to worry about though I have found. My kids have almost daily play dates now and I'm finding everything I can to involve them in. We've been to church more in the past two weeks than we have been in their entire lives all together. Yes, I am ashamed to admit that and the only explanation I have for that is.... when I'm spending all week involved in something that I don't want and something that frustrates me daily ( public / outside schooling) I AM NOT doing anything on the weekend except exactly what I want to with my children. This is just my stubborn personality at work. I am also extremely lucky that our area has an AMAZING homeschool network. HOME stands for Homes Offering Meaningful Education and they offer our kids everything that they would benefit from in a normal school setting. I can't wait to meet the families and get involved with them as much as possible!

I am now so happy to report that all that stress and frustration is completely gone from my life and things are exactly they way I've wanted them from the beginning! :) Not to say that I am stress-free. Ha! That's a joke. :) I am very tired and extremely ready for bed at the end of the day, but it's a good kind of tired. I know once the baby's born this will improve greatly, as a huge part of my exhaustion comes from my huge, aching body and all that growing a baby involves.

Here are some pictures from our homeschooling days so far... the first few a lot of you have probably seen (on Facebook) but the rest are brand new!! :)

Hope you enjoyed! Have a great day!! :)

Okay, so...

I'm homeschooling now. This is something I've always wanted to do... since before I had kids and this past Monday we had an event in our community that pretty much made my decision for me. There are a lot of things in life I can't control, but one thing I can control is how my children are schooled and at least for the rest of this school year, Emma will be schooled at home.

I feel so great about this decision. Yesterday when I was really needing to decide one way or another to prevent Emma from missing any more school than necessary, God put two wonderful women in my life whom I had never met before and whom BOTH told me... THIS is what is right for YOUR family. And I know it is. I know it in my heart. So thank you Kathy and Andrea. I know you probably don't read my blog, but if you do, please know that you made my tough decision a really easy one and you put my heart at ease. You rock.

SO! The past 24 hours have been outrageously busy with me getting everything ready. After my session yesterday afternoon, the kids and I went to Barnes and Noble then Wal-Mart. Then last night I cleaned, rearranged, purged, and researched.

I slept 5 hours and woke up with my mind going 500 miles per hour.

The kids and I got up, got breakfast, and went to School Tools, the most awesome teacher supply store ever opened. It's nearly the size of a small Wal-Mart and it has all you could possibly ever want and more for teaching. Amazing.

Then we came home and I went and raided my Granny's attic, which is where I stored all of my teaching supplies after I stopped teaching in the public school system before Emma was born.

Below is the result of the last 24 hours of blood, sweat, and... not tears... SMILES. ;)

This is the view from one corner of the room. Our school's official name is the Arnold Academy. You have to have a name for your school when you homeschool in NC. Underneath are ribbons with clips to display my Emma and Noah's great work they do! :) Then there are learning posters, number lines, colors, shapes, calendars, all that good stuff, and the stash of learning manipulatives by the window...

Oh! And those are Emma's and Noah's little desks. Aren't they precious??? I hope to eventually find a table for cheap that we can all sit at together, but for now this will do. And you can see what is what here...

The kids and I are all so flipping excited about this! Emma kept asking all day... Mom, when are we going to start our homeschool? When are we going to start? When are we going to start. Unfortunately, I feel the need for everything to be "perfect" before I officially start anything, so at 4:30 this afternoon, we finally did our first activity. It wasn't anything academic. It was a little art project. You can see it displayed above on the work wall. Emma's fall tree is on the left and Noah's is on the right. I should add that Noah had lots and lots and lots and lots of help. But he still did a good job. ;)

Oh, and yes, he is being schooled as well. Pre-school materials and at a very relaxed pace, but he wants to do school too just like his big sister, so who am I to deny him that?? :)

This is a great adventure, friends and I've never felt more at peace about a decision before. This is PERFECT for our family. :)

Here I am in all my baby belly splendor at 14 weeks. I definitely get bigger quicker with each pregnancy. It's like my body remembers and just says okay, we know what to do... POP... huge belly. ;)

I love it, though, so really... I'm not complaining. :)

I think it's quite ironic that the last time I posted on this blog, I was super sad because I had just experienced my third miscarriage. Now, though, I am very happy to report that we are over the moon and expecting baby #3 on February 15th.

Most of you guys already know this, of course, because I am completely incapable of keeping any baby secrets. And on that note, I don't know about the rest of my friends who either are expecting or have expected in the past, but I personally am anxious for the day when the pregnancy test just goes ahead and gives either two pink lines ( for YES! You are pregnant with a GIRL!) OR two blue lines.... for boy. I am so anxious to know the sex of my baby the instant I know I'm pregant. So, so, so anxious! I hate having to wait until that 20 week ultrasound. The suspense drives me crazy. I just want to be buying stuff! I have no idea how those parents who wait until the birth to find out the sex do it. God just did not give me that kind of patience.

Which brings me to my next topic... Intelligender (see picture above if you have no idea what I'm talking about). With Intelligender you can find out the gender of your baby as early as 10 weeks, according to the paper on the inside of the box. Now, I'm almost 14 weeks and I have been meaning... alllll these weeks to stop by the drug store to pick up this test and it never fails.... I always forget! Until today. Today I remembered. And now the suspense is about to kill me. I could've done this a month ago and it hasn't bothered me. But now that the test is in my house, the minutes are ticking by like HOURS. It says to wait for your first morning urine, so that's what I'm doing. I'm pretty sure tomorrow morning will get here sometime around Christmas... or at least that's what it feels like.

I'll for sure blog an update so you know what this baby is probably going to be. And just for the record, I think it's a girl.