I am excited. The kids are back to school! But I’m not excited because they are leaving my home and going out to be taught by someone else. No, I am excited because I GET TO TEACH THEM! While I know this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I am so blessed by the excitement I have every new day at the prospect of teaching my children once again.

Since it is Top Ten Tuesday, I thought I would share my Top Ten reasons why I am excited to be back into the school routine. Here they are in random order!

1. New Year = new theme! I decided to have a theme each calendar year instead of school year, and this year we are focusing on “Be Like Christ”.

2. Our school schedule is planned a month IN ADVANCE! When everyone got sick, I fell off the planning wagon and was winging it and flying by the seat of my pants for WEEKS. I don’t know how we got anything done. So I am excited to have my planner back up and running and our days well thought out (with plenty of room for error!)

3. New curriculum! We began Level 1 of All About Spelling with our 6 1/2 year old. He is nearly finished and ready for Level 2! Plus, this term we are slowing down on our science (since we can’t very well visit the zoo at -24 degree celsius temperatures!) and picking up some Canadian civic studies and geography. War of 1812 reenactments, here we come!

4. Our almost-5-year-old JJ is READING! And ready to start AAS Level 1, just in time for The Boy to finish with it.

5. I finally planned in some time for Keeker to do “school”. She kept asking me the last few months “What can I do?” and besides our BFIAR worksheets, I didn’t have much! I am greatly blessed by the tremendous talent of Jolanthe over at Homeschool Creations and her and Carissa at 1+1+1=1 with the tot school printables, as well as Spell Outloud worksheets. Watch out world, there’s another reader coming your way!

6. I am planning and putting up new memory verses as well as working on filing our old ones via the Charlotte Mason suggested memorization system. Time to refresh the memory and add new material!

7. Skiing! Ok, this doesn’t really have much to do with the kids being back at school – except that it means that now there is snow on the ground and the hills are laden and begging to be ridden! We are looking forward to a lot of family trips to the ski hill.

8. Homeschool co-op begins next Friday! We’ve been missing it for the past month and a half, it will be great to reconnect with the families and the kids’ friends in the group.

9. Back to school means more homeschool blogging material! It’s hard to blog about homeschooling when you’re not doing anything :D I have some great ideas to hopefully share in the near future!

10. And, of course, since we purchased our Christmas tree at Ikea, that means that we have a $20 off coupon to use at Ikea – and now that I did all the purging I did over Christmas break, and we have to re-organize our school books and paperwork, a trip to Ikea is most definitely in order. Woot!

 

Thanks for popping over to see my Top Ten Tuesday list! Check out some more great ones over at Oh Amanda!Top Ten {Tuesday}