spring is in the air....

spring is in the air (at least today it is) and that makes me want to open up the house and clean everything (still a little too cold for that).
The cleaning is still going to happen (well some of it) as today Grandpa is off from work so CO is loving being his shadow doing 'mans work'. He is so funny as the two of them are out puttering around the yard in their work gloves. The snow is perfect today for shoveling so my little man is happy with that. That is probably his favorite thing to do in the winter. Our decks have been cleared all winter. Some mornings he had a hard time focusing on breakfast as he wanted to get out and shovel.
I have been immersing myself into researching homeschooling. In my heart I feel that this is what God wants for our family. He has been really speaking to my heart about raising my son to be his steward and when I look at how God has blessed me with the job that enables me to be a stay at home mom Monday-Friday, homeschooling really makes sense. I want to not only instill a love of learning into my child, but I want him to learn all about God and his plan for our lives. I want him to learn to serve daily and to live the life God intended for him. I think this all would be difficult to instill in him if he is away from me 8 hours a day and me away from him all weekend.
There is SO much out there by way of homeschooling. I have been looking and analysing what I think would work best for our family and for my little one. I want it to be fun yet highly educational at the same time. I feel like there is so much more I could have learned in school that I didn't. I want him to know good 'literature' and LOVE to read. But at the same time I want him to 'know' God's creations outside. I want him to know names of trees, birds, etc. I want him to experience and be amazed at how things happen in the world of nature. He is naturally curious about these things already. It often amazes me the things he notices already at only 3.
This year we have been homeschooling to some degree. In September I did a lot of activities to go along with stories we were reading. We focused on a lot of fables and nursery rhymes. He LOVED it! He had his favorites for sure. I would get excited over some of them because I knew he would love the story and I was usually right. The first time I read him the three little pigs, he spent the whole day (and the hour after I tucked him in for the night) saying 'and I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll BLOW your house down'. He loves any stories with the 'big bad wolf'' and more recently a 'troll'. The three billy goats gruff...I think I read it over 50 times in a week. He loved the enormous turnip and every version we came up with of it. One of his ALL time favorite is 'the gingerbread man'. These days are filled with 'fe fi fo fum'. Every morning after breakfast we put the next day up on the calendar and we practice talking about the date. I have it set with the numbers being an AB pattern so we read the pattern and we also practice counting the number of days of the month so far. We've been also having a bible verse each week. I don't expect him to memorize it but it is good practice for us and it is the beginings of putting the Bible into his heart. I often print out the verse so he cuts it into strips and tapes it together. He is a cutter extraordinaire and is happy that I let him use tape for this activity. Also the verse helps practice some pronounciation. We sing songs about the days of the week and we also talk about the weather.
So, as a three year old we do some 'school' now. He has some workbooks that I will drag out occasionally and we will work on thim if he is wanting to. He LOVES crafts and especially painting so I try to do crafts weekly. I think I would enjoy this process more if I had a glass table top for my diningroom table (something I am currently saving up for) as cleanup would be easier. When we painted valentines last week we did potato stamping and by the time we were done, the top half of his body was 75% pink (he paints topless still for this very reason).
I think I have settled for JK & SK we are going to do Sonlight as our core. It has a big literature focus which works well for my little boy that LOVES books. I also like that the theme for those years are 'God's World' so that the books we will be reading will be talking about people and places around the world.