Our First week with a 2nd grader, preschooler, and a toddler.

Our first week of school I had two goals I wanted to meet. Those goals were: relax and work on keeping our work area clean. I'm happy to say that I feel like we met both of those goals! I hope that we can continue with both of them throughout the school year. Keeping our work area clean really helped me relax more. I don't like ending the day with a house that looks like a cyclone hit, it makes me anything but relaxed. Having places that everything belongs really helps to meet that goal. Plus, I feel like it such a great life goal. Something else that helped this week came from my friend Chris. A mom figure in her life told her that while you have small children have one thing you tackle every day together on the house. It could be the bathrooms, or the yard, or cleaning their rooms. Pick one thing, set the timer and spend  thirty minutes working on it. If you do that one thing, keep up on your laundry and your dishes then you won't feel so stressed. I've tried various things but this one really works for us. One day we picked a bathroom. Each child had their jobs. My four year old took all the rugs and towels to the laundry room and helped put new ones out. Bodie cleaned the sink while that was going on. I cleaned the toilet and the floors. It was much more fun and I was able to give them tips a long the way. This week we detail cleaned one bathroom, our van, the yard, the livingroom, and their bedrooms. They still have their regular chores daily and so do I but we actually get some detail stuff accomplished! This makes me relax even more!

Here's some fun things we did in school this week! 


I love the fact that Bodie loves to read. I have discovered that when he's quiet now it isn't always a bad thing!

Letter bingo. This game is super easy for Bodie, but it is a fun game I can do with both of them and Brylee is really getting good with all her letters. 

For this game I had letters on cards and Brylee would search through her box to find the right letter. I forgot to get pictures of Bodie, but he did the modified version of this. He grabbed a scoop of letters, wrote all the letters down on paper and then used those letters to see how many words he could form.

 While they were busy doing that, Brooklyn had things to do also! Playdough is always a good time filler......

 When you get bored of rolling it will seem like a whole new thing if you add straws or pipe cleaners! Those are so much fun to poke in the dough!

And never underestimate the power of a box with a hole that is just big enough to put pasta in! Loads of fun!

  We made music using only things around the house...

A few more things we did...... Have I mentioned how important your own laminator is to a homeschooler? I love mine. I use it for everything. 

 Over all a great start to the week. I found a great site that provides free lesson plans for the school year for preschool. I printed off the first week and will start that next week with Brylee. I will post the website and pictures of what we did next week.