School Days, School Days

So another long, over-due post is finally making it up on the blog..... in case you didn't know, we're homeschooling!

After much prayer and conversation, Chris and I both felt like the best thing for Cadence, for this year, was to homeschool her. We don't know what we'll do in the future, we're honestly not even discussing it at this point in the game, but for this year, we believe that this is a good decision for all of us. And so far, it has proven true - for the most part :)

Knowing my lack of discipline coupled with the complete chaos that we live in, we decided to go with an all-in-one curriculum. We knew that we wanted it to have solid Biblical teaching as a big part of it, and for someone else to be the main teacher, so we went with the A Beka Academy. Basically what this is is a video (and a very dated one at that) of a teacher teaching a class of kindergarten children. Other than how out of date her hair and clothes are, we love it! The teaching is great, Mrs. Bere (the teacher) tells Cadence what to do in her books so that we can't argue about it - we just do what Mrs. Bere says. :) Cadence is convinced that i email Mrs. Bere every day to let her know how she is doing - and for now, we're not telling her differently...

The hardest part has been that all the writing thru A Beka is done in cursive and so Cadence has had to re-learn how to write her letters in cursive. So far we have done all the vowels lower case and the letter "t" After a couple of threats to break her hands (not my proudest mom moments) and lots of prayer from my small group and Ladies Bible Study, we're gaining victory and Cadence still has the use of both of her hands! Praise GOD!!

Here are a couple of pictures of our school set up. The desk is in our dining room so that I can be doing other stuff and still keep her on task. We use the big monitor, not the laptop, it just so happened that this day I couldn't make the regular DVD player work so we were improvising with the laptop.

Her books - they actually do still (for the most part) stay lined up on the shelf!

In case you're interested in what she's learned so far, here is a VIDEO we took tonight of some of the highlights of her school career thus far.....:)