Schooling Sunday

Yesterday was another Schooling Sunday at our house.

We recently started adding in a Saturday and/or Sunday here and there to our home educating, to help balance out the weekdays that we have needed to be away from home and haven’t put in a full day of our usual educating.

Now most homeschool parents think this really isn’t a big deal to miss days occasionally, and it isn’t, I promise.  When we are away from home my kids are still learning as we’re out doing life, I just want to stay somewhat on schedule.

I want to give my kids every opportunity to learn and make it the best environment possible, and we’ve found we can get a whole lot done on the weekends right now (bonus: weekends mean 2 teachers in the house).

Trust me, when summer comes we will NOT be voluntarily adding extra days around the table, we will be packing our bags and heading to the nearest park, beach, or BBQ!

Yesterday while the big kids were working on their math (we are back to using, and actually loving Math-U-See), the tot and I sat on the rug to play with pattern blocks.

She and I took turns placing pattern blocks on these worksheets.  I can usually just set this activity out for her, but she was craving a little extra momma time, and I’d never deny that.  Since Mr. Awesome was home to help the big kids, this worked out perfectly for us.  Also, he is amazing at teaching math, I wish we had realized this sooner in our home educating journey!

Anyway, I love these pattern blocks for so many different reasons, but what I especially loved about them yesterday was that they were an easy activity that my youngest and I could do together, and that they all get dumped into one box, so clean-up was a breeze (especially because she could do it herself)!

Other ideas with pattern blocks include shape or color sorting, pattern making (blue, green, blue, green, etc), and stacking.  We also found some fun worksheets from Confessions of a Homeschooler to make letters and numbers with the blocks.

Now that I have enrolled in the Instant Ink program through HP, I print as much as I want and don’t even care that I’m using a ton of colored ink.  It’s seriously a gift for homeschool moms everywhere!  I’m on the $9.99/month plan right now, but I think I’ll go down to the $4.99/month plan within the next few months when we won’t be printing as much.  Still, it’s a great deal!  Best of all I’m not refilling cartridges and staining my hands with ink like I’ve done for the past 5+ years!

When I bought our 2nd set of pattern blocks off of Amazon I bought the set that included the activity pack.  It came with heavy duty card stock “worksheets” to get our activities started.  Since then I found several more worksheets online, for free.  I print and laminate them and store them in the box that the original activity pack came in.

FYI:  According to my Amazon order history, we own 4 sets of these blocks now!  I just occasionally add them to my order when they drop below $8 or are an add-on item.  Our whole family loves to lay on the floor and play with these or create giant master pieces together, so we can always use more of them.  They’re sturdy and I have no doubt that we can later on pass them on to our grandchildren.