Homeschooling this year

Over here the new school year just started and the kids have been at school for almost two weeks now. They have new teachers and some new classmates and they come home every day so excited about everything they've done that day. It's a joy to see that.

We continue homeschooling activites in the afternoons after lunch and napping. As the kids are still quite small I don't really have any academic goals for them for the year. What I want to focus on with my kids is giving them an understanding and appreciation of nature, teaching some basics of English, keeping up and developing their Finnish, doing a weekly Bible study and doing lots of arts and crafts.

For nature appreciation we use Green Hour Challenge and we usually do one task each week. We have all really enjoyed the tasks as they're simple and even the smaller one has the patience to complete them. Notebooking happens most of the times but not always.

I teach the kids English mainly because Luana really wants me to :) I hope that as they grow up they'll speak fluent Finnish and Portuguese as well as good English. Should they want to learn some other languages I'd be more than happy to help them in doing so (I also speak Spanish, German and Swedish and would be happy to teach them any of those or then find a teacher of another language). At the moment they've got half an hour of English at school per week and they love it. At home we've started to have a moment of English every day. We play games and do some excercises in their notebooks. I also try to speak only English to them during that time. So far they've been really excited about it and they ask me to tell them how things are said in English instead of speaking to me in Finnish. For example Luana wanted me to tie her hair so she asked me how to say that in English. Lucas had hurt his finger and wanted to know how to say that in English. I think it's so cute when they do that!

Finnish language is something we don't really "study" but I speak it with the kids all the time. Thankfully so far they don't even try to mix languages but always speak to me in Finnish and to their father in Portuguese. At the moment we read a lot in Finnish, sing a lot in Finnish and most of the DVDs and CDs we have are in Finnish. Luana just started to read today (as in took a book and actually read some of the words herself) and I'm obviously teaching her to read in Finnish. I don't want to rush her into reading but she's really keen to learn so I help her whenever she wants me to.

We do Bible studies at home roughly once a week. At the moment we use a lovely children's Bible with good illustrations and lots of additional information. We often do some crafting related to the story we read. I try to do this in the middle of the week as they get their weekly dosis of Bible study at Sunday school twice every Sunday (in our church we have Bible study on Sun morning and Worship service on Sun evening).

Arts and crafts is what we all like to do and I'm trying to come up with new ideas most of the time. I work around Brazilian, Finnish and international special dates, bank holidays etc. and always check them when I'm planning ahead. I like to have a weekly theme but that doesn't always happen. I'm planning to start arts and crafts lessons for kids aged between 4 and 6 (at least to start with) here at home and I'm hoping to start in the beginning of March. This means we'd be crafting with some other kids twice a week as well as doing our "own" crafting other days.

So this is pretty much what we do in our partial homeschool. I just read again what I'd written about homeschooling a year ago in here. Some things have changed in a year whereas some haven't at all. It was so good to write this all down. Even when everything's really clear in my head writing it down and reading it through makes it even clearer :)