Dinosaurs

After much prayer and discussion, Kevin and I have decided to homeschool Norah. Technically, she would just be in pre-k this year, but because we have decided to homeschool, we decided not to send her to preschool. (Although, both girls are going to a Mom's Day Out program once a week in the fall.)
I have done quite a bit of reading/research on homeschooling. I have talked several friends who homeschool. I went to a homeschool convention in April. I also have read a number of blogs of people who homeschool. Several of people I talked to homeschool year-round. I kind of like that idea because we can take a week or two off here or there during the school year if we want. Plus, if we use the unit-study approach there are a lot of summer time units we can study.
We bought a curriculum a couple of months ago. It is a Kindergarten curriculum, but after much review and comparison to my few years of teaching preschool, it seems to be on the level of an aggressive pre-k curriculum. The teaching reading portion is probably close to the K level as the child is reading 3 letter words by week 6. Everything else - math, science, art, etc - is more like teaching themes in a preschool classroom. Norah was already beginning to read 3 letter words so we bought the curriculum and went ahead and began. We are being totally flexible since it is summer, but since she is wanting to read I figured there is no reason to wait.
The whole curriculum is based on Creation. As Norah learns each letter she learns about something God created - A for apple, L for leaf, O for octopus, D for dinosaurs, etc. Norah and I do a little research online and at the library to learn a little about each topic. We read a LOT of books - fiction and nonfiction - about each topic. The curriculum encourages children to be reading constantly.
This week we are doing dinosaurs - which is humorous to me because it was my least favorite thing to teach when I was teaching preschool. I always taught it, though, because the boys LOVED it. Having girls I honestly thought we would not spend much time playing with dinosaurs. After getting into our dinosaur theme today - Norah is totally into it. We read a book What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs today and she cannot stop talking about it. I am going to try to post at the end of each week some of Norah's favorite activites.
In a later post I will get into our reasons for why we are homeschooling. It is something we are beginning to feel passionate about, though we realize that it is not for everyone.
Also, if anyone has a link to any homeschool blogs - let me know.