Perks of Homeschooling!!!

There are so many things we love about Homeschooling and freedom flexibility and adaptability are some of the many perks of Homeschooling. For us poor souls who live on the northern states, when it's sunny and the weather is warmer outside, man it's so hard to stay inside and sometimes I can't even focus well on what I have to do because all I can think about it's how awesome it would be to be out there enjoying this gorgeous day.
But as a homeschooler you have the option to pack up your school activities and get out there and enjoy school "al fresco" and that's exactly what we did a several days ago! We packed a sandwich, some chips, drinks, a blanket (next time I'll bring a bigger one) and the school stuff that needed to get done that day and off we went!

We found a park with a nice spot to get things done.

 Then, a little lunch break.

Lunch break and poetry time!

But it did get hot, so we moved to the picnic shelter and since I didn't think well before we left, V had packed only one small blanket so moving to the picnic shelter to do school was more comfortable for both of us. I did learn my lesson, bigger blanket is already packed for our next outing.

Also, there was another day that it was warm but the weather wasn't stable at all, it seemed like it was going to rain one minute another the sun was peeking out, so we decide to "pause" school, go out and then finish school that evening. Can you see the many possibilities? Check some of the pictures from that day and tell me if it wasn't worth the "pause".

Isn't it a blessing? Have the freedom and the ability to adapt your school day so you can enjoy outings and still get school done! After a long winter we want to get out and enjoy these warmer days.

Most of you know, I do work but very part time these days. I'm a special needs caregiver and V comes to work with me, since she was born at all my jobs she was able to come with me and all of them were great experiences for both of us. Not all of them required special needs care, but I think it's a great thing that she gets to be exposed to it and she's such a lovely girl, she's so protective and caring of the children I care. She will be a great caregiver when she grows up.

Now back to my post, last week I was asked to come to work earlier, the boy was fine but the school had to send him home and the parents were busy and couldn't get away so again I packed the school stuff that wasn't finished, gladly most of what wasn't done were activities V could easily do in the car on our way to work, and that's what we did! Could I have finished school later on that day? Yes I could have done that, but I knew V would have been  really tired because we always go out and do lots of fun stuff with the boy, so the best option was to get things done in the car. If you follow us on Instagram you probably saw our Insta Story, sadly though,  I didn't save any pictures or videos I shared that day.

I hope you enjoyed our post. Homeschool has its many challenges but it has also its many rewards and perks. If you don't homeschool yet but has been thinking about it, you might wonder if homesschool will work out for you? Would you welcome some tips to help you make an informed decision regarding homeschooling? Then, please come and check my next post!

See you next week! Have a great day and thanks for stopping by!

Vanessa Z. Pawlicki

Why Do We Homeschool?

You know this is a question that most families ask themselves before they start Homeschooling and our family was no different, but now on our fourth year of Homeschooling I realize that I should probably question it more often because inevitably as we learn more, grow more in this process we realize that we can add more and more reasons to the initial list.

We Homeschool Little V for many reasons, these are just some of the reasons as to why we Homeschool:

Because we wanted: I just couldn't wait to start teaching her and since she was a baby I was there helping her to explore the world around her. Looking for the best educational and fun toys. If you think about it, almost all parents already do some Homeschooling. When you teach your child to recognize the Alphabet, the shapes, colors, number and so on, you're teaching and guess what?You're Homeschooling, even if you don't think you are.

Safety: loving parents care so much for their child safety and we are no different. We also child-proofed the entire house, we made sure we read all the reviews before buying the high-chair, the car seats, toys and the list goes on and on. We lived in a big city and we just didn't have the heart to send Little V to public school. The bullying, the stress and the peer pressure, not even to mention that nowadays when you send your kid to school you pray that you'll see him/her/them alive at the end of the day.

Quality of Education: it's no secret that one-on-one teaching is the best, and to be honest I never felt like I lacked qualifications to teach my daughter, I have a love for learning and I love to teach and that in my opinion is the best qualification I could have. There are great teachers out there and I see some of them on Instagram and they inspire me but with the one-on-one teaching I can tailor the lesson to her needs and likes, I can help her if she's struggling with something by trying a different approach to it, we move on at her pace.

Develop a love for learning: because I have the ability to to teach and guide her in learning what she wants or what interests her the most she can develop a love for learning. It's not learning only because she has to learn to achieve a certain grade or to fulfill the requirements, she's also learning about things that she's curious about it, things that she's passionate about it.

Freedom and Flexibility: we can choose what we want to learn about, when we want to learn it and how we want to learn it. Do we want to make a field trip? Do we want to make an experiment about it that wasn't planned? Do we want to add something else to the list of interests?  Do we want to grab our stuff and go outside because the weather is great, we can because we have the freedom to do so. We can choose the books, the curriculum, the amount of time we spend in each subject. If we have something fun to do in the morning, we can do school in the afternoon, or in the evening. Or we can start school in the morning, do other things and resume it later. That is a huge perk of Homeschooling, but my favorite of all the reasons is the next one!

Be present at the best moments: it's priceless to be there when they read their first word, when they learn how to write their names, when they spell their first words, see their faces light up when they grasp something, when they read something funny and just burst into laughter. Be there when they feel they can't do something and be the one giving them the encouragement needed  to keep on trying and then see how proud they feel when they get it right, oh well, no report card can give that moment.

Faith and Values: we live in critical times hard to deal with (2 Timothy 3:1-5), and teaching your child how to be a true Christian requires time and energy. The Bible admonishes us to teach them in every opportunity we have (Deuteronomy 6:6,7) and Homeschooling gives me the opportunity to do just so. We can together draw closer to God and he will draw closer to us (James 4:8). She will learn what the Bible really teaches and make sure her thinking and her actions are in harmony with Jehovah's righteous standards and not man's.

There are many reasons why a family would decide to Homeschool their children, these are just some of our reasons, what are your reasons to Homeschool? We would love to hear from you!


Have a great day and thanks for stopping by!

Vanessa Z. Pawlicki

Piano Lessons and weekly highlights!

Since last week we were having a school break I'll be sharing the Highlights for the previous week and some other cool things that happened.

How was our school break? It was excellent! The weather was great and we got to spend lots of time outside and had lots of fun.

If you follow us in Instagram you already know Little V started piano lessons. If you don't follow us, please feel free to follow us @athometeachingv. Karen from Teach Your Child Piano, invited me to participate in this free challenge she was offering and since we always wanted to learn how to play piano we decided to accept it. We are enjoying it very much. I can't believe yet that I'm actually feeling equipped to teach Little V how to play the piano, far from being a professional, but I do feel like I have the tools needed to teach her the basics and that's what made me decide to give it a try.It was a different proposal than any other program I had seen before because it enabled me to teach her, that gives us more time together, and we get to learn something cool together. I'll have another post sharing more details about this program.

Tracing the Treble Chef

Playing Mary Had a Little Lamb

Little V successfully completed her All About Reading Level 3 curriculum. Instead of starting Level 4 right away, I decided to dedicate some time for Poetry, again more details at a later post because I have lots of fun ideas in my mind right now and I'll share them as they happen.

For Math we use the Math U See curriculum and we love it, but since it's a mastery curriculum Little V doesn't get to learn in Math what kids her age are learning in public school, so I purchase on Teachers Pay Teachers website some activities to make sure she's learning the basics requirements for her grade, it's not necessary but it's something I feel I need to do it. I find so many cool activities there that it's almost impossible to not want them. I love hands on learning and Amy Lemons has it all. I purchased the Magic of Math Unit 3 - Geometry and Fractions and we are having  so much fun with it! There are no worksheets just really cool hands on activities.

Here's some of the cool activities:

Something else we have been doing for a while now is giving Little V more chores around the house. We started with 30 minutes of cleaning on Mondays and 15 minutes all the other days of the week, sometimes during the weekends we stick to the basics chores needed.

She likes helping and it also makes her feel good, she sees that she can also contribute and on top of all she's learning important skills.

That's it for today friends.  Hope you enjoyed our post, feel free to leave comments below, ask questions or share this post to your family and friends.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!

Vanessa Z. Pawlicki 

New Homeschooling Schedule!

Since Preschool, we have basically followed the school schedule of the public school, but I was never really pleased with the long summer break. So this year, something interesting happened. During a gathering with friends I mentioned about the fact that I do not like the long summer breaks and that I was trying to figure out a way to solve it, my friends then mentioned to me that a school district near their house has 6 weeks of school and 3 weeks break. Do I need to say that I loved learning about it?

Once I learned about this different type of schedule, I researched more about it on some Homeschool forums and groups and I found out that there are many families that adhere to a scheduling like this and some made it to fit their needs such as having breaks during family vacation and other scheduled trips for the family, others simply do shorter breaks throughout the year.

So, we started with 3 weeks of school and 1 week break, and once we moved it was a blessing being able to use 2 weeks for moving and getting settled in the new place. Thus far we have nothing to complain about this type of scheduling and to be honest it seems like it will be a regular feature of our homeschooling journey from now on. Little V will still have her summer break but not as long as she used was used to have before, and for that I'm happy.

This week we are on school break and we started by going flower shopping and getting some things done around the house.

While flower shopping she was able to learn a little about perennials and annuals flowers, and when we were ready to plant the flowers she wanted to help too.

Hope you'll have a great week and thanks for stopping by!

Vanessa Z. Pawlicki

Making Plural Nouns!

There are so many rules for making plural nouns and I do love the fact that Language Arts and Grammar for 2nd Grade from Annie Moffatt at Moffatt Girls Activity Pack is full of really good and engaging practice.
A quick review of some of the rules:

• Add -s to most nouns to make them plural (chair - chairs)
• Add -es to nouns that end in CH, SH, S, SS, and X (peach - peaches, brush - brushes, dress - dresses, fox - foxes)
• in nouns that ends n -y: with a consonant before y, drop the -y and add -ies (baby - babies);with a vowel before y, just add -s (toy - toys)
• in nouns that end with -f, -fe, change the -f or -fe for -ves (leaf - leaves, knife - knives)

Now, you can check quick video of  Little V practicing making plural nouns with nouns ending in -y.

 She made the plural of candy - candies.

Hope you have a great day and thanks for stopping by!

Vanessa Z. Pawlicki

Sewing Lessons!!

I love sewing and I've been able to make Little V a dress, and some other stuff myself. My love for sewing of course made her want to learn to sew. So, during the summer break we had a few lessons and she was able to make a pillow case for her doll and we started a quilt for her other doll.

Here's a quick video of Little V sewing:

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by!

Vanessa Z. Pawlicki

Making Good Use of Activities!!

We all know the adage "Practice makes perfection", right? Based on that we all know also that practice helps a student to really get the idea, helps them to feel confident and sometimes we run out of activities or have to search for more activities or we can simply add something to an activity that you already have in order to give them more practice.

On Lesson 12 of All About Reading level 3, Little V was learning about Syllable Division Rule for Three Consonant Tiles. Basically, she had to figure out where to separate the syllables in words that have 3 consonants between the vowels, like in CHILDREN and PUMPKIN.

One way: like in CHILDREN, first you locate the vowels (highlighted in yellow), then you separate the syllable right after the first consonant in between the vowels. CHIL-DREN

Another way: like in the word PUMPKIN, again locate the vowels, but in this case if you separate right after the first vowel, you won't make a word, so you'll move the second consonant to the first syllable. PUMP-KIN

One of the activities of this lesson was to read the word in a loaf of bread and "cut" them (separate) the syllables with a fake knife. I thought it would impress more on her mind if we could use colors. So I asked her to color the vowels, and then we would check which way would be best. She got it and she was really good at it. After we did it with the markers, she was able to do "cut the bread with the knife" as intended and I was happy to know that she really understood the rules of dividing syllables with the consonants between the vowels.

Hope you have a great day and thanks for stopping by!

Vanessa Z. Pawlicki