Gearing Up For School :)

For the last little bit we've been getting ready to start school. Sounds a bit early doesn't it??  I want to get the 3 month reading program done before our newest little Miss gets here in Nov so we're starting early. Yet another reason to love homeschooling :)

We have a old dresser in our dining room/living area that is our School Dresser. We also have some stuff in a 3 drawered orange walmart plastic 'thing' for lack of the correct name for it. It has deep drawers and can hold a lot of stuff!! We call it the 'orange thing.' Anyway, the other day we took EVERYTHING out of both the dresser and the orange thing put it all on the table, sorted through it, threw some of it out, re organized it, added to it and put it all back in. Sounds confusing.. it was. :) We did it with organization and ease of use in mind, placing tape 'nametags' on several drawers so no one gets too confused or forgets where things go.

The orange thing now holds a drawer for CRAFTS which is not all our craft stuff but whatever we use on a weekly/daily bases. It also has a COLORING drawer which holds just coloring books, crayons ect. The last, top, drawer is a drawer for me called EXTRA's. It holds things like flashcards, booklets, counters, ect. It will also hold my schedule book and everything else I need close at hand.

The Dresser has a drawer for each of these : J's grade 2 math marking paces,  books, the reading program, J, L and E. In that order. E can open the bottom drawer but not the other two so it made sense to put hers on the bottom. The kids drawers have all their paces for the whole year in them. That's a LOT of paces!! E was VERY excited to find that some of hers were PURPLE.. :) Word building :) All three of the school aged children did notice that R did not have a drawer and ALL THREE of them thought that wasn't fair. SO I'm going to get a R tote and put all her 'to do' stuff in it. She'll want to be at the table with the others if Baby J isn't up and so I'm going to make her up some fun stuff to do while the others work on paces.

Last year I kept all J's finished work in a medium sized red and clear tote that sits on top of the orange thing. I'm not too sure what I'm going to do this year. I might use the same tote or a slightly larger one and then make dividers in it, top to bottom, and each of them will have a section?? Or something... I'll probably figure it out before too long.

Then today I REALLY NEEDED to get some sort of a chart, schedule ect written up. Now that Papa is back at work it's time to get everyone ready for a scheduled day setting before we start school full time.. which may be as early as next week.. or maybe the week after.. we do still have chickens to butcher. Oh and no worries we'll still have TONS of time for summer activities as 'school' will only take a couple of hours every morning we'll still have our afternoons and 'PRO D' type days. Anyway I went online this morning after writing a very rough draft of what I was looking for and I found it on here... www.dltk-cards.com  
Very cool website with a very elastic chore chart that you can retro fit into just about anything. I made Morning Chore, Afternoon Chore, Daily Chore, School Chart (which I'm not sure I'm going to use) Weekly Chore charts as well as a blank time frame fill in chart that I'm going to use for a weekly 'thing' chart. You know like Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we'll do a extra 1/2 hour of P.E or lego or something and Tuesdays and Wednesdays we bake cookies.. Those are just examples but I find it's really helpful to write this kind of stuff down as I have a bit of pregnancy induced sieve brain.  Each chart has an area to check off though I think we are just going to use them as reminders. Now I make a list every morning and it's always got the same stuff on it.. or very close anyway, these charts will just help everyone know what we're doing and give us some structure on when and what. I'm going to tape them to the wall and use them as references.. if we start having trouble we'll try making up new ones every week and marking them off... but that sounds like a lot of paper to me. I may get them laminated and just use a washable marker if it comes to that.

file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/user/Desktop/Unused/Morning%20Chores%20chart.htm This link SHOULD take you to one of the charts I made up this morning. I've already added bread to the bottom of the chart..  If I find I have too many changes I can always go make a new chart SUPER easy :)

Papa's sister Auntie R said she'd see if she can figure out some kind of a PE program for the kids so that's another thing off my lap :) Some sort of endurance building running/biking/stretching/strength building umm.. Chart.. so I don't have to figure it out day by day :) Thanks R!!

So now the only thing, that I can think of at the moment, we need to do before we start school is find the CD with all the ABC's songs on it. I apparently have the songs saved on our external hard drive we use to back everything up if I can't find the CD. Normally I would just go get them off the computer but our main computer took a deadly nose dive awhile ago so we are only using the laptop.  I also haven't checked my main teaching books for the course and it might be stuck in one of them. Hopefully I'll find it somewhere as it belongs to the school :) I know it's around here somewhere as I clearly recall getting it back from Mrs. T. I probably put it some where 'safe.' Oh dear!!