It's starting to look a lot like school time!

Okay, I know it is early for school. We have had a fun summer break. We have continued our reading and math over the summer at a laid back pace, but we are ready to start again. The plan is to start early (the first week of August) so that we can take as long of a break as we need in the fall!

I have been busy with all of my teacher preparation. I never had any desire to be a teacher, but I sure do love planning and preparing for my own kids! I am so excited about all we have planned for this year. Maybe in another post I will share our curriculum choices and extras for first grade.

This year I decided to add something new to our morning school routine. I am really excited about the way it turned out so I thought I would share! Last year the boys had their own calendars to color, but I wanted to have something that was more visual and included more items for our morning.

Due to the fact that we have absolutely no space for a school room, or even a wall, I created a morning calendar board on a tri-fold poster board I got at Walmart. All the other items I had on hand or found in the dollar bins at Target. Last year I got a laminating machine for my birthday. Yes, I am a homeschooling Mama nerd who LOVES my laminating machine! All the items are laminated to survive multiple little hands. Small clips, Velcro dots, or key rings attach everything to the adhesive hooks on the board so we can easily switch everything out to suit our needs. When we are done, it will be folded up and tucked behind a bookshelf out of reach of little hands!
 

Here are the items I decided to include in our board. Lest you think I am too creative :) all of these printables I found online through various homeschool blogs. I have listed all the links at bottom of the post. These Moms are amazing and willing to share all their hard work! I just tweaked their ideas to fit our needs.

On the left side of the board we have:
Daily Prayer Focus Items
Our Food for the Hungry children we sponsor
Missionary Family of the week
and Godly Character Traits (there are a total of 26, I am not sure yet if we will focus on one per week, or rotate every day to get more exposure to the traits.)
We will also add our Bible verse for the week to our morning routine.

In the middle of the board we included:

Books of the Bible, Old and New Testament
Letter/Color/Number/Shape of the Week
Weather/ Season
Skip Counting
Make the Date with coins
and 100's chart

While some of these items are just for review for the boys, I included them so Gracie and Jacob could be a part of morning school time too!

 On the right side:
Today's Temperature
What Time is it?
and Days in School (with focus on place value for numbers).

On the top is the day of the week and date. On the very bottom I attached a pencil case that holds mini dry erase markers and our extra board pieces. In order to keep the pieces not all mixed up, I made laminated sheets of card stock paper with Velcro dots, so all the pieces are sorted and stored, ready to find quickly.

Here is a list of the amazing blogs with all of these ideas. These blogs have so much information I can easily get overwhelmed and feel like a homeschool failure. I honestly don't know where these Mom's find the time! They have so many great resources- for free! Check them out if you have time, but don't get overwhelmed!!!

Homeschool Creations
Godly Character Traits
1plus1plus1equals1
Confessions of a Homeschooler