Tomorrow is their big day

Tomorrow morning, my children will be starting public school. Part of me of course is happy for them, even excited (mostly because they are). The other part is well...not so happy, but I am not one to sit around and complain so life goes on! I do have that quote on this blog from Maya Angelou, which reflects how I feel " If you don't like something change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."

I mentioned before that I am planning on after schooling with the kids. There are many activities that we have done in the past in our home school that we all enjoyed. I thought I would share some with you here. I have decided to continue working through some of the curriculum that we had started this school year. It will be at a much slower pace, but I think it will be beneficial. I will have to assess after a while and see what might be needed more, or less. I searched on the Internet for ideas and examples on what others are doing with after schooling, but I haven't found much. I signed up on the Well Trained Mind Forum because they have an After schooling section! This is almost like researching homeschooling all over again, lol!

Here are a few of the activities we enjoyed and that I am planning on continuing or doing again:

Author Fiesta ~ every month a new author is selected and we read every book possible from him/her, learn about that author's life, and discover new worlds! With this month's author, the focus was on nature and animals.

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and the Junior Iditarod ~ we choose a musher and follow their progress through the race. Last year, during the race which takes about 10 days, we paused our regular home school schedule and did everything Iditarod! Math and writing related to the race, the mushers, the Iditarod Trail, or the sled dogs. Geography and history also became a big part of this study. But most importantly, we all loved every minute of it!

Journey North Mystery Class ~ this activity took us from the coldness of February to the arrival of Spring! Here is a description from the site (better than I can explain it!) :
Somewhere under the sun, kids at ten secret sites are watching how day length changes with the seasons. We challenge you to find the ten Mystery Class sites using sunrise and sunset clues. Mystery Class starts in early February. Get ready now by building skills and understanding of Earth's daily and seasonal cycles.
We took part of this activity last year and won by finding all 10 locations correctly!
If you look through the archives of my blog, you will be able to see posts related to those projects.

Another part of our home schooling that I will keep is the reading aloud. All three children enjoy it when I read to them, and I do too! With Princess also going to school, but only every other day, I will have a lot of time to read to her during the day. At night time, we will be reading chapter books that Dragon and Fairy will enjoy a bit more. There are so many books we want to read together! I just started reading The City of Ember to them. I will be doing a separate post about this. I will also be starting our Canadian History very soon, reading through The Story of Canada and The Spirit of Canada.

For the regular curriculum that we might use, either before or after school, I was thinking of continuing on with Singapore Math for Dragon because it seemed to be working really well. For Fairy, Growing with Grammar was a perfect match, and she also wants to continue working on her Pet Store Business Math. We will continue on with History Odyssey very slowly... I will still require them to read at least 40 mn per day independently, and about 10 mn of reading aloud to me. Dragon is almost finished reading Stuart Little to me and we both enjoyed that. Fairy has been reading The Door in the Wall for history, which has a lot of old English..a bit tricky, but she is getting through it! I will see after a few weeks what works, what doesn't, and what we might need to supplement...staying flexible!