Notebooking and a Great Site

One topic I have found while getting ready to start homeschooling is "notebooking". This is something that I think will be great fun for the girls. I originally thought about doing "lapbooking" because it is so similar to scrapbooking and I thought that I would like doing it, but then I admitted to myself that I have a tendency to want to have the girls projects look perfect and I try to take over and that is NOT what this is supposed to be about! SO...I decided to do notebooking instead because this is about their writing. The things THEY write about. PLUS I have a 1st grader who LOVES to write so I thought notebooking would be right up her alley. I stumbled upon this blog the other day: http://www.notebooklearning.com/ and I LOVE it. There are so many FREE pages that you can download and use at any time. I love all the resources I have found for free out there that help make homeschooling easier and this is one of those sites!

Fears....

Some days I am quite confident that this decision was the correct ones, then other days I am so fearful of hindering my kids. I've been working on lesson plans and I didn't pick the correct curriculum. The Portraits of American Girlhoood is proving to be a lot of work for me. I wanted something that would tell me what to do each day and was pretty self contained. This program is written like that but when I looked it over I felt it was seriously lacking in some areas - like Science and some aspects of Language Arts. So, I decided to mainly use this program as a history guide. But, that means I have to add in science, add in certain aspects of language arts, add in math, so I am now drawing up week by week/day by day lesson plans and it is over whelming because I sit and look at it and wonder if I am covering everything. I'm still struggling with believing that the exact things that the girls public school counterparts will be studying isn't necessarily what we HAVE to study. Yes, we need to do math, spelling, reading, science, language arts, handwriting, etc. but just because they are studying electricity in science doesn't mean we can't study the solar system. So..here I sit stressing! And chocolate hasn't helped!

THEY ARE HOME!

Last day of school was 2 days ago! When our Kindergartner got off the bus at 11:30 I literally was jumping up and down and as she crossed the road and reached me I grabbed her and screamed, "It's your last day of school!!!" I proceeded to come inside and cry! I cried because another milestone has past. I cried because I am still fearful of our year to come. I cried because I was happy to have her home where she belongs. I am hoping to be relatively consistent with this blog as it is a journal of our journey and I don't want to forget any of it!

Last Day of Public School!

Tomorrow is the last day of public school for my girls. Will it be forever? I don't know..When I finally decided to home school I said that I would not predict that I will do this forever. What I will do is admit that I will continue to listen to God. I don't know the plans God has for our family. For the school year of 2008-2009 God has directed me to keep the girls home and begin home schooling. He may change our direction in the future. I'll wait on Him.

Meanwhile I am watching the days slip away and I am realizing that our voyage is about to begin....I'm nervous but excited at the same time!