I’m working on being better about documenting what we learn each month, as we move into the more “serious” years of homeschooling, at least with Cookie. Right now I do have a spreadsheet that I update daily with the different lessons we cover (or review), works the kids choose independently and books we read. I’ve gotten pretty good at using that as a tool. It also helps me prepare for what’s next and remember just what I’ve planned to do each month.

But I’d like to be better about sharing it here, because I know that simply the more of us homeschoolers should “put it out there” the more accessible it will be for others who also want to get started, or honestly are just curious about what it might be like. This January 2021 post is a month late now, but I figure better late than never.

As a reminder, in January 2021 my three kids were ages 6, 4 and 2. both boys had barely turned 4 and 2 and spend most of classroom time wrestling each other and jumping off the sofa. We try to spend time learning between about 9 and 12 but it varies. Sometimes we get a lot done, sometimes it seems barely anything. But regardless of classroom time, most of our days and life really are spent learning in some capacity (cooking, gardening, tending to our flock of chickens, helping Dad build things, sewing, etc), so we don’t stress on it too much!

For January 2021 our main focus was on Polar Lands, the Arctic and Antarctica. We spent a lot of time reading books about these subjects (all from the library) and I was happy to have many different printable resources available as well.

Polar Lands

The polar activities I presented to the children were:

Life Cycle of a Penguin

Parts of a Penguin

Animals of Antarctica Cards

Animals of Antarctica Book Making

Penguin Matching Cards (simply matching different penguins)

Life Cycle of a Polar Bear

Parts of a a Polar Bear

Polar Bear Maternity Den

Parts of a Polar Bear Bookmaking

Arctic Animal Cards

Whale Measuring

Types of Icebergs

Arctic/Antarctic Venn Diagram

Language

For language, Cookie started working on her pink letter sentence strips, which she quickly mastered and moved on from! Whoops, I guess I should have moved her more quickly in the reading direction, but she hadn’t been too keen on the moveable alphabet so I didn’t think she was ready or interested until she started to try and sound out words in our environment. Now to just get her to work on writing in cursive… ?

Apple started to show more interest in letter sounds, and I realized that I simply needed to introduce them all to him, not for him to necessarily memorize one set of letters before I introduced the next set. So in January we moved onto letter sets s-r-i-p and b-f-o-g. With these letters we did a lot of matching games, as well as letter bingo. He still has a pretty short attention span for these types of activities, which isn’t to say he has a short attention span or that he isn’t learning. His focus is just elsewhere, however seeing his big sister start reading more and more his desire has increased dramatically.

Math

After reviewing the red rods with Apple and getting him to sit down and take it “seriously” with me for a minute, we went ahead and reintroduced the number rods. I’d introduced them previously, but until recently I’d had a hard time getting him to engage much in learning materials. If he’s not interested in a lesson, he will just mess with me and give me wrong answers so that I don’t make him continue the lesson. With the red rods and number rods this would look something like “can you hand me the next biggest Rod?” And he, thinking it’s funny hands me the smallest rod. He’s quite smart so I can tell that he understands what I i am asking and knows the right answer, but is perhaps bored with the lesson. However I finally told him that we needed to cover some basics before we could move onto more advanced math like his sister (which he is very interested in, of course) and so he’s been willing to at least show me he understands and work with me on some basic concepts finally.

Cookie really enjoys math, so we spent a lot of time working with math during January. We introduced golden bead subtraction and multiplication, did subtraction word problems (she loves word problems it seems), and I presented her the addition strip board as well as the addition charts.

Sensorial

We didn’t spend a lot of time on sensorial in January, however I did introduce the decanomial squads and it’s different works to Cookie, something we both greatly enjoyed. We also worked on the language for our Geometric Shape Cabinet, something I’d say is “better late than never” if you look at what age this sort of thing gets introduced in a classroom, but us being a homeschool and a home with many other things to do and other real life learning opportunities… well our classroom learning doesn’t get the same priority as it would in an actual classroom and that’s just fine.

Apple and I worked on the Color Tablets, another item he’s long mastered but has resisted learning the names of the colors. However getting him to actually participate finally (yay 4 year olds!) he has quickly mastered the different color names. We also reviewed the brown stairs and red rods so we could move onto the number rods.

All together we did a Hot/Cold sensorial activity and also sorted Hot and Cold cards, as well as Hot and Cold What to Wear Cards.