As we take each step forward in these unfamiliar waters of homeschooling, I am learning as I go. Some mornings, it’s really hard to get the kids rounded up to start school. We’re often irritated with each other-not a good way to start the day.

I’ve been intentionally pausing to pray to begin our day. I pray for clear minds and the ability to concentrate. I pray that we would love God and each other as we make our way through the day. We also start the day by reviewing our catechism and bible memory verse. Lately, our devotions have been from Big Truths for Little Kids: Teaching Your Children to Live for God.

I’ve also found that it’s hard for my son to jump right into schoolwork right away. Who wants to start off the morning doing spelling or math anyway? To help ease our way into schoolwork, we do our “morning work” first.

I’ve posted about some of this before but we’ve added new things as well. We spend about fifteen minutes doing things my son finds interesting.

1. We do a ‘weird word of the day’ which is just a fun way of saying that we learn a new vocabulary word. I try to choose words that my son would find interesting. One week we learned what the names of different cars meant (accord, corolla, etc.). We discuss the word’s meaning, etymology and try to write a sentence using the word.

2. We also like to find out what happened ‘this day in history.’ The History Channel’s website posts what happened in history each day of the week and includes a video to watch.

3. We enjoy doing brain challenges. There’s a great website that gives math, logic and word puzzles to solve.

4. Geography is a favorite of my son’s and he asks each morning to do a geography challenge on the National Geographic site. It’s fun and challenging!

5. We also like to pretend to be detectives and solve mysteries using MindWare Bella’s Mystery Deck.

6. It’s also fun to look up whatever he’s interested in. We look up scientific questions he asks as well as questions about history. Sometimes, what we’ve learned about what happened that day in history will spark more Internet searching.

Do you have any great resources to share?

Linking up today with: