People are always asking me all these strange questions about home schooling. They act as though I should be worried that Mooch is not getting an adequate education. I'm pretty sure the kids in the kindergarten class down the block at our local elementary aren't doing half the stuff she's doing. I decided to follow her around the house taking pictures of everything she did when she got home from her half day of school. She attends school Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 9am-1pm. We do the rest at home.

This is Mooch doing math. She is on my bedroom floor next to my bed. This lesson teaches place value.


All Mooch has to do is match the number on the card with the number of tens and ones it takes to compose that number. This keeps her carrying and borrowing skills strong, because she has a deep understanding of numbers, patterns, and multiples.  She's really into it.


This is Mooch fiddling with a replica of the human body. She knows all the parts and she likes to assemble and disassemble it. We've studied the digestive system in great detail, because it interested her. She's now interested in the skeletal system, so she'll be all bones for the next few weeks.


Though she's been reading for about a year and a half, Mooch's reading really picked up over the summer. She read 5 chapter books in 4 weeks. She loves Junie B. Jones!


We went to the library to explore some other books, and it turns out she really likes Judy Moody as well. She finished half of the book today.


The last thing Mooch does each day (usually about an hour before dinner) is write in her journal. She is free to write whatever she feels. I don't bother her about grammar or punctuation yet. That will come next year as she has already mastered it in speech. What I do is pull out all the misspelled words on the page, and those become her spelling words for the week. A couple of this week's words are: second, leader, and meander.

Labels: teaching, tuesdays with mooch