The more I look at things, the more frazzled I get. While I am completely opposed to a "boxed curriculum", I am finding it rather overwhelming to make any concrete decision. I have read more about different approaches to homeschooling. Based upon how Cerdwin reacts to the different materials I have been "testing" her with over the past week or so, I really think we need to use an unschooling approach. I am going to try to just follow her lead for a while and see how it goes. Even though I am trying to follow standards outlined for Kindergarten skills, we certainly have plenty of time. Some days we might sit at the table, others at the computer, and others will be spent exploring outside the house and traveling to other places.
Tuesday's efforts proved to be somewhat frustrating for us both at times. I gathered information from
Lesson Pathways for Math, Science, History(Social Studies), and Language Arts. She and I worked through the
Science lesson-we created a Science Notebook.(
http://www.squidoo.com/interactive-notebook) This proved to be a fun and satisfying lesson for her. She consistently looks forward to science related studies.
Our
Social Studies lesson was a bit more of a challenge. Our focus was the community where we live. The suggested pathway was to create a map of our community which would involve a considerable amount of drawing. Her pencil/pen/marker skills are still somewhat lacking and she tends to avoid anything that requires much effort in that area. I decided to steer in a little different direction. We chose to list her favorite places to travel, how we get there, and what we see on the way. She and I got a lot of giggles and smiles from this method.
Language Arts included reading the story:
The Princess and the Pea. She dressed up in a costume as the princess, gathered lots of pillows, blankets, and her "lucky rock" which played the part of the pea. I, of course, was designated as the prince. She acted out the part of the princess and climbed upon the huge pile of pillows and of course she could feel that "pea"! We danced and had a wedding. We will continue this week on the pathway outlined using this story.
The
math lesson was left to Jason when he got home from work. Unfortunately, that one got pushed back. It involved going outdoors on a nature hunt. He was in no mood to go back out in the heat. Instead, she played some games online to hone in on some number recognition skills.
Later, she played some games on the Wii with Jason.
I am exhausted, but feel like we both gleaned much from our experiences today. Tomorrow is a new day and I think we will travel to a new destination.
It just hit me that the bottle of laundry detergent was nearly empty and I had just bought it. I looked at the bottle and it reads 32 loads. No way had we done nearly that many loads of laundry. Given there are 3 adults and 1 child in our house hold, we do 12-15 loads each week. I looked at the back of the bottle and the directions explain how much of the liquid to use. It is approximately 1/2 of the cap full for normal loads and about 3/4(1.9oz) of the cap for large loads. Makes sense now! All 3 of us had been filling the cap to the brim. We had used Charlie's Soap liquid for a while before switching to the powder. Since I had to stop using 
