First Month of School!

I can't believe we have been homeschooling for a month now!  It seems like a blur... some days forever long and others so fast.  It seems like we are always busy!  I feel like I have been learning a lot too.  I learned that I should have started with my school rules board.  If you didn't guess the first one on there has been our hardest one.  This last week was a million times better than we have been so that gives me hope ;).

Here is our wall with our big map that we talk about every morning.  We review the continents and our country, state, and city.  The kids love to help find them all!  There is also a new white board I need to put up that gives the kids a new chart for finishing each subject.  We started this chart this week.  I think the little checks help the kids feel like they are always building towards their rewards too!

The kids favorite thing is history.  We are starting with the beginning of the earth.  When we got to cave paintings we decided we needed to do some on our wall, on butcher paper of course.  When we were camping the kids were making their own bow and arrows.  They also did a charcoal drawing.  I love how much they love it and putting it into their real life experiences.

The school room!  Where all the magic happens.  We do the pledge every morning as well :)

Our most recent history project was making our own clay pots from salt dough.  Let's just say ours didn't turn out as nice as the cool pictures we saw.  We also recently discovered how people used to make tokens out of clay and such.  The kids make their own tokens today that they can use to turn in for their rewards.  

Here is Talmage's pot and tokens

Sandra putting her tokens in her pot

Grant's pot cracked in half, but he's still using it ;)

The different shapes for the kids tokens.  Mhari, Talmage, Sandra and Grant

One of the other things that we have done to make school better is put an extra lesson on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday so that way we have Friday's off of our regular school work.  Today we made it to the library.  In the future we will also be able to do our field trips!  Being able to have more time to do fun things has really made homeschool that much better!  
Speaking of fun things, getting out each week for co-op has been really great!  The kids all love their classes and I have enjoyed doing P.E. for the little kids!  By the end of the day we are all exhausted :).  Oh, and we have 4-H on Wednesdays as well as cubs later that night.  Some days it seems like we are so involved it's crazy!  It's a good crazy though and we love doing it all together!