Desk and homeschool . . .

First off, the desk is GREAT! It is very sturdy and comes fully assembled out of the box. Seems to be excellent craftsmanship. It came from amazon.com, as does the majority of everything that I own LOL!



Now a few words about homeschooling. I have dreamed of homeschooling for a long time now. I was pondering on this even before I had kids. My degrees are in science and healthcare, not in education. Although sometimes I do wish I had an education degree. It would come in so handy now that I have found my life's calling! Now that Analese is pre-school age, I have decided to try my hand at some informal pre-school homeschooling. I do not use just one particular curriculum. I have customized a curriculum that works for us. Real life experienced homeschoolers have told me that homeschool is not limited to a curriculum anyway. Homeschool is a 24/7 venture, and to do it effectively I must be on the lookout for constant educational opportunities in everyday life.

Here are some of my favorite homeschool materials:


For pre-school workbooks, I am using these two (both from Amazon):





I found this cool dry erase alphabet manuscript pad at Wal-Mart. Analese likes to trace the letters with her washable crayola markers, although we really are not focusing a lot on writing letters at this point. We are still just working on letter recognition and phonics:



And speaking of letter recognition and phonics, this book is great! My mother-in-law got this book for Analese. Not sure exactly where, but I would venture to guess Sam's since she gets a lot of stuff there. Either that or TJ Max (do they sell books at TJ Max?)



Three year olds learn from play, so I make sure to get Analese plenty of playtime, indoor and outdoor both. One educational activity I found that she enjoys is making the homemade play dough. We made blue (well, actually turquoise) play dough just this morning. And we had an entire numbers and letters lesson with these cool cutters that I got from....guess where....AMAZON!



I try to teach her a few virtues here and there. Well, yeah that is most important. So I've found this book from Amazon to be very helpful. It teaches such virtues as patience, kindness, forgiveness, obedience, sharing, manners, truthfulness, and few others.



I also want to teach her some Bible. Here are a couple of the better picture/story Bibles out there for young kids. They can be found at Amazon (I need to buy some amazon stock):




Analese has a pretty good home library, and we also try to get to the local public library once a week to check out a few books. If we don't get around to doing anything else school-wise, we at least read every single day.

Extracurricular: Analese does ballet/tap/gymnastics once a week for an hour at The Little Gym. This is great for providing her lots of enjoyable physical activity.

I think homeschooling is a very efficient way to educate. My dream is to one day be able to homeschool my girls Monday through Thursday and finish by early afternoon so they can do fun extracurriculars and develop whatever talents they have, be it music or dance or ice-skating or underwater basket weaving. Then I really hope that we can take Fridays and go out to serve the community in some capacity. I volunteered once a week at a community service center run by my church before I had Analese. I am realizing lately that I am really missing that aspect in my life - the aspect of servanthood. I know that I am doing a very important job right now in raising my two little ones, and taking time off from volunteer service is expected and understood. I just wish to instill a servant's heart in both of my girls. When they are both school age I do want to take them out to serve people who are less fortunate than we are. So many kids grow up very sheltered and have no idea the situations that other kids are growing up in. I just want my girls to have an awareness and a desire to try to make the world a better place.

There are plenty of good socialization opportunities with homeschooling. More and more people are homeschooling and forming communities that get together for various classes and extracurricular activities. So I really don't worry about lack of socialization. My girls will probably have more free time to socialize than a traditionally schooled kid.

Anyway, if you actually read this entire lengthy post, I hope you got a good insight into homeschooling. My personal goal is to take it one school year at a time and then to asses how we are doing and what we should do for the next year. I would like to do standardized testing along the way, no matter what the state laws are requiring. I learned that the state that I am currently residing in (Texas) is extremely lax and does not have any testing laws for homeschoolers. I want to test anyway, just to see how we are doing and to determine if there are areas in which we need to improve.

WHEWW! Can't you just feel my excitement jumping out of your computer screen? I've been pretty pumped about this idea for a while now.