Project 365 Day 13 How we homeschool

For the last few weeks my kids were having marathon viewings of shows like Wizards of Waverly Place and pbskids’ Fetch!  This week they’ve been asking to do math problems, cooking experiments, and reading practice.  True, at the beginning of this week I instituted Kendzie Decree #1: Before doing anything on a screen, the following must be done: 1) breakfast, 2) Read, write, or do some math,  3) clean something, 4) see Mom, and Kendzie Decree #2: Everyone must be done with #1 before anyone can use the computer, t.v., etc. — but I only held strictly to it on the first day.  Yet, we are having a more productive week.

Rhiannon and I were discussing why you can write remainders in division as fractions or decimals yesterday and I am seeing Caroline has made progress in reading ability despite no formal lessons.  This week we’ve been doing a few relaxed lessons each day in The Ordinary Parents’ Guide to Teaching Reading.  Ian is joining in the fun too.  He measured a stack of blocks with a ruler yesterday and announced it was “five feet tall.”  LOL

When I came downstairs this morning after my shower, I found all three of my kids playing an ABC bingo game.  I love the way my kids help each other learn.  When I gave Ian the box of color tiles to play with, he threw them around and then Rhiannon grabbed a big handful of them and disappeared into the dining room.  A few minutes later she came back and gave me a bar graph she drew showing the quantity of each color of tiles she had.  When she asked if it could be her math for the day I asked her to write a sentence about the graph.

After dropping Rhiannon off at singing class this evening, we sat in the car to wait until closer to the start time of Caroline’s gymnastics class.  Right away Caroline climbed into the front seat with a little notebook and told me she wanted a story math problem.  So I made one up for her:

She read it almost entirely herself and figured it out quickly.

I took the photo in aperture priority, f/4.5, ISO800 and just color corrected and cropped in PSE.