Repost: Homeschooling 101 - our first weeks of homeschooling

Hi there! If you are new here, welcome! We have just opened this little blog carried over from our family blog here – and are reposting some of our old favourite blogs. Feel free to have a look around! Life has changed a lot since these early homeschool days!

"Being so very new to home schooling, we still haven't perfected the art of keeping the kids from falling asleep whilst getting through the structured, 'academic' part of our day (at the moment there is still very much an academic part of our day, however I am definitely intrigued by the concept of natural learning - however terrifying that may be!).

So the last few days have been about finding extra-curricular activities that are both fun and challenging (something that I hope will be easier as we go along!). 

Yesterday we devised a challenge, originating from the famous $25 challenge, but stretched it to $100. The challenge was to create an itinerary of everything in our cupboard/ fridge/ freezer, think up creative meals around them, research relatively inexpensive ingredients and devise a shopping list for $100 worth of food to last our household a week! As there is quite a few of us, this was just a little bit of fun, and I thought that it might help the girls develop their budgeting skills and get in a little bit of mathematics, however our girls took to the challenge with gusto, and took it to a whole other level!

Fast forward two hours and both girls had a full week of menu plans (which were researched using a variety of international recipe books from the library, along with websites for simple food recipes!)

- the menu included gluten-free options and specific items to make baby food!

- they had created a real-life online shopping account on a food chain website 

- completed two separate delivery orders for a week's worth of food shopping

- most of the shopping was fruit, vegetables and grains (!!!)

and if that was not impressive enough, they were both a good $30 short of their target total for the week

(yes...really)

So I did what any good Mumma would do - processed the delivery order and let the girls go wild with organising the family's food for the next two weeks!

These are pics of my brood organising their orders into food categories, bagging ingredients according to  recipes and days of the week, and creating a menu schedule to post on the fridge

...and Sam swimming in food

 It is amazing what kids can do when you give them a little time, freedom and imagination