Started a little homeschooling today and was encouraged by the response my son and my nephew had! We only did nature study and worked on sight words- and initially they complained about it. So I did have to say- "yes we are doing this now". But once we started the kids got into it. I asked them to find one thing outside they wanted to learn more about and they caught a "roly-poly". Lol. Kid favorite of course. All I did was have them draw a picture of a roly-poly (from watching the live one they put in a jar) and then googled "roly-poly facts" and found a page with interesting facts such as the fact that they breathe with gills, and can eat their own feces. (Great reaction on that one, ha.) So that was fun, and then during the baby's nap I went over some sight words with my son and nephew and they then voluntarily read through "Green Eggs and Ham" and "Hop on Pop" together. I don't have any materials yet so I'm just using whatever I have around the house. My nephew is having reading struggles (he is a rising public school second grader) so it was good to have him reading every other page of the entire (long and repetitive!) Green Eggs and Ham book. Unfortunately my niece who is 5 was completely left out and didn't want to do activities I offered or listen to the story but just sort of moped around until we were done. She wanted the boys to play with her instead. :/
Anyway, regarding the advice I need. Long story short, I will be watching some other children this summer and getting paid for it but this means that 3 days a week I will have a 7yob, 6yob, 5yog, 3yog, 3yog, and a crawling baby in my house!! (including my own kids) I am planning to HS my 6 year old son in the Fall but my husband wants me to "try" it over the summer before we make that commitment. Like I said- today went well but we only did a couple of things and I don't have much in the way of materials and will not have money to buy anything until mid to late July. I did order a phonics program so we'll be doing that. And we can do nature journals. And library books. I wanted to start math too but I really feel lost without a packaged curriculum. I guess because I'm new at this. There are lots of free resources on the web but I would have no idea what to teach him or how! I guess maybe for routine's sake I could have DS (and probably the 7 and 5 year old) do some math games online, work on free worksheets, etc??
I want to make this introduction positive and fun for them. They DID complain today when I said it was time to do sight words, but then they enjoyed it. I hope that this does not become a chore to them especially my DS because then he will start saying he wants to go back to school in the Fall and NOT do homeschool. (He totally loved kindergarten at public school) I feel alot of pressure to show my husband that we can do this, and get my son to like it also.
Thanks in advance for any tips, advice, etc!!