Jen Vo

This Week: Explore! 🗺️ 🐾 🌿

When I first decided to homeschool, I told myself that our first year would be a year of exploration.

I wanted to give us room to try different things, follow their interests, and learn what works best for our family. I knew I didn’t want to spend the entire year trying to perfectly replicate a traditional classroom at home. Instead, I wanted to use this first year to experiment, pay attention to what my kids respond to, and build a homeschool rhythm that feels natural for us.

That’s why this week, I’m leaning a little more into child-led learning.

We’ll still be following the curriculum and academic goals I’ve laid out for the year, but when it comes to our enrichments, activities, and opportunities to explore, I’m giving the kids more freedom to help guide what we do.

Exploring Beyond the Textbook

To facilitate that this week, we’re heading to the zoo!

There’s something really special about being able to take what we’re learning and experience it firsthand. We can read about animals in a book, look at pictures, and talk about their habitats, but there’s a completely different level of learning that happens when you can actually see them in front of you.

And honestly, isn’t that freedom for hands-on learning one of the biggest perks of homeschooling?

I want our homeschool to leave room for those opportunities—to follow a question, take a spontaneous field trip, spend an afternoon outside, or dive deeper into something the kids suddenly become fascinated by.

This year is giving us the chance to figure out how to balance the structure we need with the freedom I wanted when we started homeschooling in the first place.

Going Back to the Basics

Along with our exploration theme, I’m also adding another curriculum into our day that focuses more specifically on pre-reading and early literacy skills.

Because his birthday falls toward the end of September, he’s in an interesting spot developmentally. He’s beginning to hit some of those kindergarten-readiness milestones, while there are still other areas where I want to slow down and spend more time building a strong foundation.

Rather than feeling like we need to rush ahead, I decided to go back to the basics.

For reading especially, I want him to feel incredibly confident in the foundation he’s building. We’ll be working on pre-reading skills and the alphabet while giving him plenty of repetition and opportunities to feel successful.

We’re going to be starting All About Learning’s Pre-Reading course and seeing how it fits into our days.

I also decided to purchase the teacher’s manual. As much as I want my kids to feel confident in what they’re learning, I want to feel confident in how I’m teaching it, too. These early skills are such an important foundation for reading, and I want to make sure I’m giving him the support he needs—not only for my oldest, but for my other kids when it’s their turn.

A Week of Exploring

I’m excited to see where this week takes us.

One of my biggest goals for this first year of homeschooling is to become comfortable with the idea that learning doesn’t always have to look the same. Some days may be structured around the table, while others might happen at the zoo, outside in the dirt, through a book, or completely unexpectedly because one of the kids became interested in something.

I’m learning that the goal isn’t necessarily to find the perfect homeschool routine.

It’s to find what works for our family.

So here’s to another week of learning, exploring, following their curiosity, and figuring it all out along the way. 

Check out my Amazon Storefront below for all the supplies I’m using this week!