Dusting off the books

Wow...what a year it has been. Boston is half way through the school year and I feel like time has flown by!!! My great idea for Afterschooling were soon an after thought after a rough end of the year last year. I felt like I was just "getting by" and surviving the best I could. But now I feel like life is getting back on track and I'm geared up for my afterschooling adventure again! Boston had an accident on his bike in December and had surgery and unfortunately missed an entire week of school because of it. He broke his left elbow and his is left handed so that stopped all handwriting as well. He was back at school for 1 week when they broke for Christmas vacation. Of course Christmas was crazy around out house and not much work got done at all. So when he went back his teacher soon noticed that he is having a hard time with blending words. He knows all his letters and the sounds they make, but when it comes to sounding out words he will sound out all the letters but can't blend them together to make the word. I met with his teacher yesterday to discuss this problem and how we can work to help him get back on track. She really believes it was just the bad timing of the accident and that with work he will be just fine.

So you can see how my afterschooling got back into swing now! So out came all the educational material I had purchased. I've blown the dust off and we are back to work!

Right now I'm working with him on Hooked on Phonics for Kindergarten, Flash cards of sight words and the an, at and it family words, number words, and color words. I'm also going to be adding in How to Learn to Read in 100 easy lessons and eventually adding back our Math program we bought: RightStart Mathematics. He will also be playing more with the CDRoms he loves called Brain Play. They are great and he does love them. I'm also ordering the Leapster Kindergarten game that goes with his Leapster gaming system.

Dallas is eager to learn so today I bought Hooked on Phonics for Pre-K for him. He already knows all his upper and lower case letter and their sounds. I think he will move quickly through this material. We already did some today and he thought it was so much fun!

I'm going to try my best to keep up with this blog to keep me accountable to what I'm doing and how the kids are progressing.

My journey into Afterschooling

I'm starting this blog to encourage, educate and inspire others in this new thing called "afterschooling." Since we have decided to send our oldest soon to kindergarten at a charter school I decided I still wanted to have a very active role in his education. I love homeschooling and we have considered it for years, but right now in our family it would not be the best option. And I don't feel God has called me to homeschool this year. So I thought I would still like to take the best of homeschooling and apply it. Then I found out there's actually a whole new movement called "afterschooling."

In an article by Christine Alcott she described afterschooling as "Afterschooling occurs when a child attends a public or private school full or part-time. Parents commit to further strengthening the education of their children at home. Afterschooling shares many things with homeschooling - a commitment from a parent to consciously educate, time, creativity, enthusiasm, and love. What is different is that afterschoolers work with or at the same time as a 3rd party educator. "

This completely describes what I was deciding to do. I had never heard of it called "afterschooling" and I'm so excited to find support for it out there. I thought many of you would also like to hear more about it and I wanted to also have a place to include afterschooling things I'm doing so I will be able to remember and maybe even duplicate for the other growing boys in our house.

So join my on this journey into "afterschooling!"