First day of our new homeschool year

I know it's super early to be officially starting school, but we did. Monday was our first day back at it. With a cross country move in September, I figured it would be best to get a jump start on the year. And after not doing any school work for almost 4 weeks, we were all ready to start homeschool again. Noah even told me last week, "I miss homeschool."

The boys will be doing 2nd grade work. They'll be working on math, phonics, penmanship, writing, grammar, zoology for science, geography, American history, spelling, reading, and drawing for fun.

Sarah did some preschool last year, so I'm calling it K-4 (kindergarten for a 4 year old) this year. We'll continue learning the letters and their sounds, doing basic math, and learning to read with Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.

I did make a video going over all my curriculum choices for the year for those that are interested.

I need to brag on my boys for a minute here as well. Learning to read has been a LONG process. We started in kindergarten when they were 5, and it has been slow and difficult. They didn't like reading much, especially Noah. I knew we were making progress this year but felt discouraged when I had to test them at the end of the year, and the passages were all too difficult and long. But we continued just trying to help them understand that reading can be fun. I put a bunch of early readers in their room, so they could read at night. We listen to audio books in the car. Dad reads them chapter books at night. They love books - they just weren't huge on reading them.

On Monday I took them to the library to sign them up for the summer reading program. All it entails is them reading 15 books and then they will get a coupon book for discounts to local places including some water parks. They were so motivated they came home and read a bunch. The next morning, the both sat down and read to themselves for about an hour until they each had read a total of 15 books. It's been a long road getting here, but I feel like we can finally go to that next level with reading. I'm one proud mama!