First Week of Kindergarten!

* I have a huge amount of resources and I am a very unorganized person. I don't keep track of every where that I find different resources for my school.  I will try to put links to the various places that I got things from and work harder at keeping track.  Writing this blog was an after thought, I didn't think I'd actually need to keep track of where things came from.  If you see something on my blog that doesn't have a link to it and you know where it may have be found, let me know so I can give credit to whoever made it or provided it.  Thanks!


We did O-Fish-Ally in Kindergarten for our first week of homeschool.

I found various fish themed printables on several different websites. Here are a few pictures of what we did.

O-Fish-Ally Balloon: I found a template on http://firstgradeblueskies.blogspot.com/2012/06/o-fish-ally-new-freebie.html

I used the same template to make these to staple on the snack bags for the week. I had Whale crackers (yes I know they are not "fish" but they were cheaper than goldfish crackers!), Gummy Sharks and Swedish Fish candies. 

Our Bible verse for the Week was Isaiah 40:12 "Who else has held the ocean in His hands?"

This was my marker board at the beginning of the day. I made a plan for the day and as we did each task we crossed it off.

Rainbow Fish painting.

We read a couple of the Rainbow Fish themed books and had fun painting a picture and putting tissue paper on the fish for scales.  I had several different worksheets that I found online to have him work on for addition and number tracing. 

Tracing page that was fish themed (not sure where I found it)

It is getting late so I'm going to stop for now with this post. I'll add more probably Thursday!

Famous Homeschooled People

I came across a very informative list of famous homeschooled people and some famous homeschooling parents. I'm sure there are more to be added to this list, this was just one of the lists that I found. I find it pretty interesting that so many names that I recognized were listed.  Here is the list and the site I found them. http://www.homeschoolacademy.com/famoushomeschoolers.htm
Famous Homeschool Parents

   Will Smith - singer, actor

·  Michael Card - singer, songwriter

·  Mike Farris - lawyer and co-founder of Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA)

·  Robert Frost - Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

·  Len Munsil - attorney and President of The Center for Arizona Policy (CAP)

·  Paul Overstreet - musician, songwriter

·  Kelly Preston - actress, wife of John Travolta

·  John Travolta - actor, pilot

·  Lisa Whelchel - former actress, "The Facts of Life", now a pastor's wife and author

·  Darrell Waltrip - NASCAR Racer 

Constitutional Convention Delegates

·  Richard Basseti - Governor of DE
·  William Blount - U.S. Senator
·  George Clymer - U.S. Representative
·  William Few - U.S. Senator
·  Benjamin Franklin
·  William Houston – Lawyer
·  William S. Johnson
·  William Livingston - Governor of NJ
·  James Madison - 4th U.S. President
·  George Mason - Justice of VA
·  John Francis Mercer - U.S. Rep.
·  Charles Pickney III - Governor of SC
·  John Rutledge - Chief Justice
·  Richard D. Spaight - Governor of NC
·  George Washington
·  John Witherspoon
·  George Wythe - Justice of VA

Presidents

·  John Adams

·  John Quincy Adams

·  Grover Cleveland

·  James Garfield

·  William Henry Harrison

·  Andrew Jackson

·  Thomas Jefferson

·  Abraham Lincoln

·  James Madison

·  Franklin Delano Roosevelt

·  Theodore Roosevelt

·  John Tyler

·  George Washington

·  Woodrow Wilson

Statesmen

·  Konrad Adenauer

·  Henry Fountain Ashurst

·  William Jennings Bryan

·  Winston Churchill

·  Henry Clay

·  Pierre du Pont

·  Benjamin Franklin

·  Alexander Hamilton

·  Patrick Henry

·  William Penn

·  Daniel Webster

Military Leaders

·  Alexander the Great  - Greek Ruler

·  John Barry - Senior Navy Officer

·  Stonewall Jackson - Civil War General

·  John Paul Jones - Father of the American Navy

·  Robert E. Lee - Civil War General

·  Douglas MacArthur - U.S. General

·  George Patton - U.S. General

·  Matthew Perry - naval officer who opened up trade with Japan

·  John Pershing - U.S. General

·  David Dixon Porter - Civil War Admiral

U.S. Supreme Court Judges

·  John Jay

·  John Marshall

·  John Rutledge

·  Sandra Day O'Connor

Scientists

·  George Washington Carver

·  Pierre Curie

·  Albert Einstein

·  Michael Faraday - electrochemist

·  Oliver Heaviside - physicist and electromagnetism researcher

·  T.H. Huxley

·  Blaise Pascal

·  Booker T. Washington

·  Erik Demaine - Popular Science Mag: One of the Most Brilliant Scientists in America

Artists

·  William Blake

·  John Singleton Copley

·  Claude Monet

·  Grandma Moses

·  Charles Peale

·  Leonardo da Vinci

·  Andrew Wyeth

·  Jamie Wyeth

Religious Leaders

·  Joan of Arc

·  William Carey

·  Jonathan Edwards

·  Philipp Melancthon

·  Dwight L. Moody

·  John Newton

·  John Owen

·  Hudson Taylor

·  John & Charles Wesley

·  Brigham Young

Inventors

·  Alexander Graham Bell - invented the telephone

·  John Moses Browning - firearms inventor and designer

·  Peter Cooper - invented skyscraper, built first U.S. commercial locomotive

·  Thomas Edison - invented the stock ticker, mimeograph, phonograph, and perfected the electric light bulb

·  Benjamin Franklin - invented the lightning rod

·  Elias Howe - invented sewing machine

·  William Lear - airplane creator

·  Cyrus McCormick - invented grain reaper

·  Guglielmo Marconi - developed radio

·  Eli Whitney - invented the cotton gin

·  Sir Frank Whittle - invented turbo jet engine

·  Orville and Wilbur Wright - built the first successful airplane

Composers

·  Irving Berlin

·  Anton Bruckner

·  Noel Coward

·  Felix Mendelssohn

·  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

·  Francis Poulenc

·  John Philip Sousa

Writers

·  Hans Christian Anderson

·  Margaret Atwood

·  Pearl S. Buck

·  William F. Buckley, Jr.

·  Willa Cather

·  Agatha Christie

·  Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

·  Charles Dickens

·  Robert Frost - Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

·  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

·  Alex Haley

·  Brett Harte

·  L. Ron Hubbard

·  C.S. Lewis

·  Amy Lowell

·  Gabriela Mistral

·  Sean O'Casey

·  Christopher Paolini - author of #1 NY Times bestseller, Eragon

·  Isabel Paterson

·  Beatrix Potter - author of the beloved Peter Rabbit Tales

·  Carl Sandburg

·  George Bernard Shaw

·  Mattie J. T. Stepanek - 11-year-old author of Heartsongs

·  Mercy Warren

·  Phillis Wheatley

·  Walt Whitman

·  Laura Ingalls Wilder

Educators

·  Amos Bronson Alcott - innovative teacher, father of Louisa May Alcott

·  Catharine Beecher - co-founder of the Hartford Female Seminary

·  Jill Ker Conway - first woman president of Smith College

·  Timothy Dwight - President of Yale University

·  William Samuel Johnson - President of Columbia College

·  Horace Mann - "Father of the American Common School"

·  Charlotte Mason - Founder of Charlotte Mason College of Education

·  Fred Terman - President of Stanford University

·  Frank Vandiver - President of Texas A&M University

·  Booker T. Washington - Founder of Tuskegee Institute

·  John Witherspoon - President of Princeton University

Performing Artists

·  Louis Armstrong - king of jazz

·  Charlie Chaplin - actor

·  Whoopi Goldberg - actress

·  Hanson - sibling singing group

·  Jennifer Love Hewitt - actress

·  Yehudi Menuhin - child prodigy violinist

·  Moffatts - Canadian version of Hanson

·  Frankie Muniz - child actor

·  LeAnne Rimes - teen-prodigy country music singer

·  Barlow Girl - Alyssa, Rebecca, and Lauren Contemporary Christian Music

·  Jonas Brothers - Kevin, Joe, and Nick Performers

·  Jacob Clemente - Broadway Actor 
 

Business Entrepreneurs

·  Andrew Carnegie - wealthy steel industrialist

·  Amadeo Giannini - Bank of America’s founder

·  Horace Greeley - New York Tribune founder

·  Soichiro Honda - creator of the Honda automobile company

·  Peter Kindersley - book illustrator and publisher

·  Ray Kroc - founder of McDonald's fast food restaurant chain

·  Jimmy Lai - newspaper publisher; founder of Giordano International

·  Dr. Orison Swett Marden - founder, Success magazine

·  Adolph Ochs - New York Times founder

·  Joseph Pulitzer - newspaper publisher; established Pulitzer Prize

·  Colonel Harland Sanders - started Kentucky Fried Chicken

·  Dave Thomas - founder of the Wendy’s restaurant chain

·  Mariah Witcher - founder of Mariahs Famous Cookies

·  Daniel Mills - founder of Salem Ridge Press

 

Others

·  Abigail Adams - Wife of John Adams; mother of John Quincy Adams

·  Ansel Adams - Photographer

·  Susan B. Anthony - reformer and women’s rights leader

·  John James Audubon - ornithologist and artist

·  Clara Barton - Started the Red Cross

·  Elizabeth Blackwell - first woman in the U.S. to receive a medical degree

·  John Burroughs - Naturalist

·  George Rogers Clark - Explorer

·  Davy Crockett - frontiersman

·  Eric Hoffer - social philosopher

·  Sam Houston - lawyer; first president of the Republic of Texas

·  Charles Evans Hughes - jurist; Chief Justice

·  Mary D. Leakey - fossil hunter; wife of Richard Leakey

·  Tamara McKinney - World Cup Skier

·  Harriet Martineau - first woman sociologist

·  Margaret Mead - cultural anthropologist

·  John Stuart Mill - Free-market Economist

·  Charles Louis Montesquieu - Philosopher

·  John Muir - naturalist

·  Florence Nightingale - Nurse

·  Thomas Paine - political writer during the American Revolution

·  Bill Ridell - Newspaperman

·  Will Rogers - Humorist

·  Bertrand Russell - Logician

·  Jim Ryan - World Runner

·  Albert Schweitzer - Physician

·  Sir Ernest Shackleton - Explorer

·  Herbert Spencer - philosopher, sociologist

·  Gloria Steinem - founder and long-time editor of Ms. magazine

·  Jason Taylor - plays in the National Football League

·  Mary Walker - Civil War physician; recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor

·  Lester Frank Ward - "Father of American Sociology"

·  Martha Washington - wife of George Washington

·  Frances E. C. Willard - educator, temperance leader, and suffragist

·  Frank Lloyd Wright - Architect

·  Elijah ben Solomon Zalman - Jewish scholar

·  Balaram Stack - Award winning Surfer

·  Lia Del Priore - Award Winning Gymnast

·  Taylor Gladstone - Ballerina

 

How it began!

My now 5 year old son was about 2 1/2 and randomly one day my husband Brian said "you know you could homeschool Ahazaiah."  I said, "yeah right! I don't think so." He responded with "well you already taught him so much already, why not?"  So I decided to look into it.
The first thing I needed to know was what the laws in the State of Kansas were. I thought maybe I'd need to get a teaching degree, which wasn't out of the question, just a bit time consuming and expensive.  I found that I did not need to do that! The law basically says that any competent person can teach their child in a registered "non accredited" private school.  There are no actual laws for "homeschooling" in Kansas but there are laws for private schools, and that is what a homeschool in this state is considered. (I'm not an expert, this is just what I found out, so if you are considering homeschooling in Kansas or any other state, please make sure you check the laws for yourself. )
I found other homeschooling families that I knew and I started asking lots of questions!  I found some homeschool parents that were very helpful and some that were not.  I found some that were good at what they did and some that really shouldn't be homeschooling! (This thing doesn't work for everyone!)  One family told me about a conference that is held in Kansas City each year through the Midwest Parent Educator's, here is their website http://midwesthomeschoolers.org/.  We attended that for the first time in 2011.  One of the speakers at the conference had a really big impact on our decision for choosing to homeschool.  Her name was Carol Barnier, http://www.opengifts.org/.  She shared a statistic about bullying in public schools that blew our minds. Something like 60,000 children in the United States are Bullied in one way or another every day! That's just the number of kids that were reported, not including how many were not (if i remember this statistic correctly, someone can correct me if I'm really far off!)  Brian looked at me and said "our son is not going to a public school." The statistic actually was so overwhelming, I had chills and I had tears in my eyes.  Not every school in the USA is horrible and public schools are not evil. I'm the product of a decent public school system and I am pretty fabulous, so I've been told! We prayed and researched and prayed and talked to others, discussed, prayed some more and more and more...... you get the picture!
As Christians we brought our son before the church and God at his baby dedication and promised God we would raise him in a Christian Home (which hasn't been easy and we have failed at this many times over), and that we would follow God's leading. Homeschooling was one of the things that we felt Him leading us toward.  I won't get into all of the things that happened in our lives to show us that this was what we should do, but other than a few days of feeling discouraged and anxious, God has given us a peace about this.

I know that there are probably people in my family, some of my friends and several people in my society that think I'm crazy and not qualified to school my child.  That's fine with me! I'm all about everyone having a right to voice their opinions.  I'm doing what I feel is best for my child along with what my Husband feels is best for our child. Its not traditional in our current day society, however, over the course of time, most children were homeschooled, at least from various things that I've read.

So here we are starting our first year of Official Homeschooling! Kindergarten for the Little Guy! We are taking homeschooling semester by semester. In January if things seem as if they are not going well, we will look into alternative schooling like a private school in our area. I have faith that this is going to be one of the BEST times in our lives! Keep us in  your prayers and thoughts as you follow us on our homeschooling journey!