Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Welcome to Our Classroom!

Well, it has only taken me two months to get to this, but here it is; my post on our first week of homeschool! 

One of my reasons for doing this blog is for friends, family members and others who are just plain curious about what really goes on in a homeschooling household.  I have learned A LOT during these first two months and have so much I want to share; including our reasons for choosing to homeschool and how I am keeping my sanity through this whole thing!  That will be in some upcoming posts; for now, I just wanted to share some of the exciting things that went on during our first week.  I have already shared the bad and the ugly moments (see "It was the best of times... " post) so now it’s time for some good!

For our first week, we had a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom theme.  Rapunzel had a great time reviewing letters of the alphabet and number recognition.  Monkey-Do jumped right in and got busy working on letters and numbers too! (for an explanation of their names see the "A rose by any other name" post)

Here is a look at our very busy first week!

Rapunzel on the first day of Kindergarten!

Monkey-Do all ready for preschool!

The bonus room above the garage is now half playroom and half school room.
We still needed the playroom space for Nomo and Guy-Guy!

Alphabet Coconut Tree hats!

Coconut Counting Book

Hand print coconut trees

Patching letters back up with band-aids.  This was Monkey-Dos
favorite activity of the week!

Alphabet letter sorting

Nomo and Guy-Guy busy with blocks
(and not wreaking havoc on the rest of the school room for once!)  

To wrap up our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom week, daddy helped us out with a coconut taste test.  

I was surprised at the final results of the taste test.  The girls liked the coconut more than the grown ups!

So there you have it; our very first week in this adventure of homeschooling!  I truly feel the meaning of "You've got your hands full" while trying to keep the kids learning and busy, the housework from taking over and my husband from feeling too neglected!

These last several weeks have been a roller coaster of highs and lows for me as a mother and a teacher and as I said at the beginning of this post, I have learned A LOT!  I am looking forward to sharing more with you soon!

A rose by any other name...

I thought it would be helpful to introduce you to my family just a bit before blogging all about them! Because I will be posting a lot of pictures of the kiddos, I will use nicknames for each of them. I just didn’t like the idea of their photos and real names being on the blog. 

So here is a quick introduction to my four little sweeties!

 First is Rapunzel. She is my oldest and is five years old.  We are homeschooling her in kindergarten this year.  The nickname needs no other explanation other than the girls is obsessed with anything from the movie Tangled!

 

 Next comes, Monkey-Do.  She will be four in October and we are homeschooling her in preschool this year.  Monkey-Do got her nickname from her grandpa after watching her copy everything her older sister did and telling her “Monkey see, monkey do”.  She loved repeating the “monkey do” part back to him and the name stuck!

 

My third little princess is Nomo.  She is two years old and living up every bit of the terrible… I mean “terrific” twos!  Her nickname is actually the name of her stuffed monkey that we gave her after she broke her arm, but it is also very fitting for her. She was jumping on the bed with her sisters and fell off.  We read "Five Little Monkeys" many times after that and Nomo stands for the "no more" part of "no more monkeys jumping in the bed!"

 

 Last, but not least comes the man of the house, Guy-Guy.  He is ten months old and received his nickname from Monkey-Do when he was only a few weeks old.  With three older sisters, he is spoiled rotten and already knows how to get whatever he wants!

 So there you have it; all of mommies little monsters.  Cute monsters though, aren’t they?!? 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

 There is a reason that I have not posted anything for two weeks, that reason is that I honestly didn’t know if I could do this.  I didn’t know if I wanted to do this. I know what I said in the last post about sharing the good, the bad and the ugly but I truly had not been prepared for how hard these last few weeks have been.  By the end of our fourth week of homeschooling, I had experienced every emotion and changed my mind on every decision more than once.  I was overwhelmed, exhausted and frustrated.  This past week had been especially hard.  There was and incident with the two year old locking herself in her bedroom and another “situation” involving a diaper explosion that I’d rather not get into.  There were temper tantrums and tears on my part as well as the kids.  I sat down on the couch on Thursday night feeling defeated.  I felt that I just couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t home school to a preschooler and a kindergartener, I couldn’t keep the two year old and ninth month old happy, I couldn’t keep the house together; it was all just too much and I was ready to give up.  I sat down that night and opened the computer to face book and the first things I saw on a friend's page was a link to this post.

 http://rachelmariemartin.blogspot.com/2012/08/dear-sweet-mom-who-feels-like-she-is.html

It was like the author was speaking directly to me at that very moment.  Every word rang true.  I read it and then I read it again and then I cried.  The good “get it all out” kind of cry you just have to have sometimes.  I am still amazed by it, I needed to read it and there it was right in front of me.  Sometimes you just have to step back and thank the Holy Spirit for stepping in.

So, “best of times” or “worst of times”?  Our first month has definitely been both!  There have been many frustrating hours of trying to teach with every distraction the two year old can throw (and I mean throw literally. How many times can she throw a marker at your head before she finally gets bored?).  There have been failed lessons that I spent hours planning that the girls thought were “no fun” and as I said before there have been plenty of tears. I have learned though that it is easy to get overrun by the negative and it truly wasn’t all bad. We did have some fun somewhere along the way and I’m pretty sure some actual learning took place.  I will share some of the “best times” of our first month in some upcoming posts. 

I have taken the words of Rachel’s post to heart.  I have thought about them over and over again for the past three days now. Am I still overwhelmed? Yes.  Am I still exhausted? Yes. Do I know what I am doing? No. But, I am not giving up, I am not failing.