My New Obsession with Pocket Charts

Well it's about time that I made a new update. I wanted to wait until I had something fantastic to write about, but having an idea at all will just have to work if I plan to keep this thing going.

R has just over 6 months left until he will be "officially" beginning his year of kindergarten. I decided it would be best for us to stick to the public school calendar year for the most part so that he will have more opportunities to socialize with his public schooled friends.

For now, we have been practicing what I expect things may be like when we get started. I'm trying to find out what kind of learner R is. I have no idea what type of purchased curriculum we will be using, if anything for kindergarten. There are so many options that I definitely feel a bit overwhelmed.

One thing I have found that I will probably stick with for a while is beginning the school day with observing the calendar. I purchased a Pocket Chart Calendar by Learning Resources off Amazon.com.

This nifty pocket chart is so useful! I love that I will never have to buy a wall calendar again for our "School Room." It comes with very durable cards that I feel will last a long time, it has a huge selection of weather cards, seasons, holidays, and extras such as field trips and birthdays. We use it every morning and R has already gained much better knowledge of how the calendar works.

So every morning we begin by setting the weekdays for "Today", "Yesterday", and ""Tomorrow." We go over what month and year we are at, and look for any holidays or events that are coming up. It makes things exciting for R now that he is able to visually see how far away a fun event is when I say "Three more days!" About half way through the day we will change out the weather cards to show what today's weather has been like and how it was different from the day before.

So all in all, that is one thing down! Two actually, now that I have made a blog post about it. We still have a lot to figure out in what seems to be a quickly shortening time frame, but I feel confident that everything will fall into place somehow as long as we both have the desire to learn about ourselves, each other, and what the world has to offer us with education at home.