I called a veteran homeschooling friend and mentor and she calmed me down and let me know those were pretty common feelings. She reminded me of my goals and the real reasons I'm homeschooling. It's good to have friends like that.
From there I started doing more research on the computer. Super Frog was only 3 1/4 (pre-school) so my husband and I decided not to buy a curriculum. I stumbled on The Brightly Beaming Steps to Reading Program and the learning poster connected to it. This inspired me and got me excited about what Super Frog and I could do together. I looked for the suggested books on our library site and sent in a request. Super Frog was happy about his poster and liked the idea of themes each week.
Other things we did:
We read an old science pamphlet about animals occasionally
Pre-writing letter worksheets from the Internet
Cool workbooks from Nana with lots of mazes and fun activities (School Zone Publishing)
Bible Verses: I started with a verse and kept adding on to it. I started off with pretty heady stuff and ALL the IMPORTANT ones I thought he should know like OBEY YOUR PARENTS :)
I soon lightened up on those with finding Songs for Saplings. A CD with verses set to music going through the alphabet. I was happy about the short and encouraging verses chosen.
The Curriculum Evolves:
Can I stick to anything? No, not very well. I was frustrated by never having the suggested books in time for the week's theme. Our library system is wonderful but my requests took a while, would come in on all different days and I often didn't get to the library in time before the books were taken off hold for me and then sent back to one of the 5 different libraries in our area.
Also I was so happy with the Songs for Saplings CD I took more themes from there. For example H is for Happy are the people whose god is the Lord, so we talked about feelings.
Then December came and we had themes surrounding Jesus and the Christmas story.
It's January now and I haven't gone back to Brightly Beaming themes yet. I'm very thankful for the program though. It gave me a great structure to build on.
Our theme this week is Trucks by request. We took a crate and collected all the books we have in the house to do with cars or trucks--we have a lot. And we found all the books we have for our letter M--Give a Moose of Muffin etc.
We'll do winter next week and then I don't know what. Maybe I'll ask Frog what he would like to learn about. The homeschooling blogs have been real helpful too with ideas and inspiration.
We are still doing Songs for Saplings as our verses, letters and their sounds, pre-writing worksheets, and using the numbers 1-10. I have the Bernstein Bears Science book we'll start reading together and we're doing cool things with the days of the week, month, year and season. We are enjoying our educational Christmas presents, games, puzzles, etc. And we have discovered some great, free computer games online. Nick Jr., Sesame Street, Starfall.com and Uptoten.com
Movies that Helped us to learn:
