Thursday, November 10, 2011

Prayer, Pledge and CalendarTime

Here is a more detailed description of our "typical" homeschool day.  Look for more posts soon!

Our Homeschooling day begins with a prayer.  Right now we say a prayer, the Consecration to Our Blessed Mother,  that the children would say at the Dominican Sister's of Mary's Spiritus Sanctus Academies each day - where I worked while in Ann Arbor, MI.   I love this prayer because who better for little ones to entrust themselves to each day than their heavenly Mother who will bring them closer to Jesus and because its short, beautiful and has clear imagery for the children to understand.  As the children memorize prayers we'll add or alternate prayers so they can memorize new ones.

When I was in kindergarten, my favorite"job" was to hold the flag for the pledge of allegiance and I loved to sing  "You're a Grand Ol' Flag."  So each morning we sing and march to "You're a Grand Ol' Flag." followed by saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag held by one of the kids.  All three children love this part of the day. 

One of my favorite parts of the kindergarten day while I was teaching at St. Joseph's Academy was "Calendar Time" and it's a useful time to teach certain skills that need to be practiced daily in a fun way.  Each day we sing (in English and Spanish) the "Months of the Year Song" while pointing to the names of the months and when we get to this month, they jump up and down or put their arms in the air.

Then we add the day's date to our calendar and a Popsicle stick to our "place value" envelopes.  Though I haven't explained "ones" and "tens" formally yet, when we do learn about them they'll have had experience through Calendar time. ( I may make envelope's to help count out days of school as well to help with numbers above 31 but I haven't yet.)  After counting to today's date, we sing the days of the week song (in English & Spanish) and finally we construct our sentence for today's date and read it together:

We also check out the weather outside and record it on a graph and count to 20 by ones, 100 by 10's and mark how many days of school with a star using our number chart.

And so begins our day - this little routine takes about 10 minutes or so and it's fun for everyone.

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