Last week was our first week back and it went pretty well! I thought Wyatt was going to be all grouchy about it but he was pretty happy about resuming our normal school schedule. I am going to take that as a sign I am doing all right at this homeschool thing.

He cracked me up when we made his “Back to school” sign. When I asked him what he was excited to learn about, he said “Ghosts!”. Ummm… I don’t have that as part of the curriculum obviously. So I am going to have do some research. I did find a unit study about ghost animals, like the ghost moth, ghost crab, etc that we are going to do in October, but I will also try to find something that is more what he is expecting as well.

For our first week, I sort of tiptoed back into school. We didn’t go all out, and I think we both appreciated that. However, I feel like we did do quite a bit.

My plan for the week included (besides the basics of readin’ and ‘rithmetic) finishing up a few more states from our Social Studies curriculum from last year, introducing the art of Van Gogh, and science. I haven’t rolled music in yet, and I probably won’t until next week. Also, I’m not starting our main history curriculum until October. We are doing a whole thing with Paddle-to-the-Sea for Language Arts and wrapping state studies up in with it. We focused on Ohio, compared sunflower seeds to buckeyes (or in our case, a chestnut), read about Van Gogh, studied his painting Sunflowers, and then finally painted our own version. Our painting is a combo of Wyatt and I both – sometimes he paints on his own, sometimes I do hand over hand if there is a special reason. For this lesson, I wanted to make sure we were getting long, feathery strokes for the petals of the sunflowers, and fat dabs for the seeds, as we read that Van Gogh did when he painted his famous version. We also talked about how the painting had a life cycle sequence in it, which is pretty neat.

Add in three therapy sessions, bike riding, and time for just fun and play, and we had a very big week! This week is sort of jammed with appointments and a field trip, so it will be another slow week and that is ok.

What We Used:

This section contains Amazon Affiliate links. In addition to the curriculum I am creating for him, we also use curriculum from The Good and the Beautiful, The Waldock Way, and Blossom and Root for phonics, reading, science, and social studies.

Vincent Paints His House || Vincent Van Gogh || B is for Buckeye || Camille and the Sunflowers