Our First Official Week of Home Schooling

In order to home school your children legally in the state of Utah you must send in a notarized affidavit to the school district you live in to state that you are home schooling your children of legal school age. They sign it and then you take it to the school you are suppose to be sending your kids to and the withdrawal from that school is final. You can have your child dual enrolled. . . at home for academics and in school for extra curricular activities, ie. band, choir, sports, etc. My kids are too young for that just yet but if we continue with homeschooling I will definitely use those resources. . . after all I do pay my taxes.

It took 4 days after I had mailed my affidavit for it to be returned to me from the district. They are quick and on top of things there. I am very grateful.

This week we started with science. . . we learned about Bugs (as well as doing our daily Rs. . . Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic). We went to the library and checked out a couple books on bugs and planned some fun learning activities throughout the week to go with our bug theme. I've decided that we'll do a science theme every other week and a geography/history theme on the other weeks. So last week was bugs and this week is the beginning of our study of the great USA (I'll blog about this week later).

On to the bugs. . . on Weds. we read our books and learned the body parts of insects, arachnids, and myriapods. . .all bugs. Then we made our own bugs outta molding clay. On Thursday, we went outside and hunted for bugs (at the wrong time of day because they weren't out and all we found was one spider and some dead roley polies but we looked at 'em anyways and noticed their body parts. . .exoskeleton, number of legs, etc.) After our hunt we did a bug crawl. . . I had the boys stand against the house and then crawl, fly or squirm to me as I said, "stop - go" (one of their favorite games from when I did daycare). Then on Friday we made a giant spider outta big black garbage bags, newspaper, construction paper, and tape then hung it outside on our house for Halloween. We had way too much fun and that's only half of what we did last week. Mind you, we did have our bad moments where I had to discipline the kids but they're kids so what do ya expect.

Here's some pics of our clay creations.

The first one is Kanalu's rocket launching bug. . . he cracks me up. . . he's such a BOY!

The next one is Kolu's. He wanted to make a myriapod (centipede, millipede). He got all the body segments but got too tired to make all the legs. . . he did manage to make it a hat, back pack, and who knows what that last piece on its back is.

I had to partake in the fun. I couldn't resist molding clay in primary colors. I even couldn't settle for making one bug. . . I made two. I'm so grateful that we spend more quality time together now that I'm home schooling the kids. I'm sad that it took me having to home school them in order to get with it and do more fun stuff with them. Things really do happen for a reason!

This next pic set is of Keiko helping to look for bugs. . . I think she just had fun putting wood chips into her cup and then pouring 'em out and refilling it again.

These last two are the best. . . Kolu took the first pic (infact the boys took the pics of their own bug clay creations too) of the spider. . .we're so proud of our spider. The boys helped stuff it with newspaper and cut out the four eyes and put the legs on. Perfect for Halloween.