working full time......and now homeschooling

WOW! When Abba does things, He really goes all out. I am very excited though. He placed it on my heart to homeschool my children back in October. I argued for a while because I am single and I work full time. When would I fit it in? Do I want to be solely responsible for educating my children?
Absolutely yes!!!! After the things we have dealt with in kindergarten I can say with a resounding YES that I do want to have the sole responsibility of educating my children. I adopted my oldest child on Thursday of last week and on that Friday I went in to the district office to submit my intent to homeschool paperwork. And Bless God! he waived the 14 day waiting period so Friday was his last day of school. I was so excited.
I had already pulled my middle two out of headstart and so we started homeschooling in October. Even though my oldest was still going to kindergarten every evening we would come home and we would get started learning. My kids are very smart and catch on really quickly to things so it has been quite fun. I did find that if I am not prepared - I get quite frustrated with the way things go. I also realized that I have a teacher mentality and not a homeschool one and so I am working on changing that. the coolest thing about it though is learning who my children are. It is amazing how spending 3 hours each evening with them will actually let me know them even better than I thought I did. I am loving it.
I have been on several blogs of homeschooling moms and just trying to find ideas on how they are doing it. I am amazed at the amount of information that is out there. So cool. God has also given me several ideas for games to make and play with them that helps to teach them certain concepts. Some mornings I find myself up at 1 or 2 AM searching.....and I find some awesome things.
While I want to keep my 5 year old going along at the pace that he has been going, I am taking my 3 and 4 year olds a little slower. I am constantly making games to teach them letters, numbers, colors, and shapes. I have found that if it is a game they absolutely love it. And the cool thing about them is they will play it over and over and not get tired of it. I get tired and want to move on to something else and one of them will say "That's all mommy?". I love it.
We have a calendar - I laminated it so I could write on it with a dry erase marker. We discuss the month; today, tomorrow, and yesterday; the weather; count the days; then sing the days of the week song and do the months of the year song. After that we usually do Bible. I read about these bible cards on another blog and ordered them - Love them. We are currently discussing Jacob and Joshua. I will cover the same card for a week and they really get it down and can answer all of the questions. Then we sing some bible songs.
I separate them after this and put my 5  year old to work in his explode the code book - I laminated it as well so that he can use a dry erase marker and I can erase it each day and he can repeat the pages so that he can really grasp each concept. He also does the handwriting without tears app on my Ipad. Then he does his math and reading. I try to make sure that I include several hands on things for him to do as well to really get each concept.
While my 5 year old is doing his work I have the 3 and 4 year old (and the 1 year old) and we are working on learning to recognize our numbers, letters, shapes, and colors by playing different games I have made up.
One thing that I have learned about since deciding to homeschool is lapbooks. What a great concept. We read the same book for one week and do activities that I find online or make up each day. Then we put it all together in a lapbook. We have done Goodnight Moon and now we are doing Goldilocks and the 3 bears because it was a spinoff from Goodnight Moon. Next I want to do the Little Red Hen. The book that I have is not the one that I remember from childhood but it has the same concept. I want to find the Little Golden Book version though. The kids love the lapbooks and they take them and play "store" with them. When they finished theirs from Goodnight Moon they stood them up on the table and pretended they were working at McDonald's and ordering from each other. It was adorable. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures. They played with them the entire time it took me to put the baby (almost 2) to bed - she felt she needed to be rocked to sleep that night!
Now that we are homeschooling I'm sure there will be many more thoughts from the prairie.