Our Story

Welcome to our site! We are Joanne & Steve. After 20+ years working for a city school department and police department, we sold almost everything, bought an RV, and started living on the road with our three children. Joanne homeschooled and worked online. Over the years we worked for Jellystone Parks as well as volunteered. We stopped traveling after 7 years and bought a house. Steve continued police work with the National Park Service and Joanne taught Kindergarten. Now that our three kids are adults, we have decided to travel more and explore.
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Monday, January 2, 2012

First Day of School

While the rest of the school children were home "observing" New Year's Day, we started our "formal" schooling.  It will take a while to get a routine down, but we started off pretty well.

There are some amazing interactive websites that will greatly reduce the need for workbooks and paper, something I was eager to escape after leaving the classroom.  {I'll post these later.}  We have some "teacher" materials, of course, and lots and lots of books.

Today we worked on reading and math.  Ian is a fantastic reader and has been for for about 7 of his 10 years.  He will work independently often.  Today, he read a biography about Albert Einstein, and then, on his ipod, wrote a very good response, and emailed it to me.  Ah, technology.

The twins did some oral reading via online interactive leveled books, then worked on the phoneme -ake.  This was fun.  I have always enjoyed teaching reading, and it was great to do so with only 2 kids, no announcement interruptions, and no discipline issues. (Well, except for Brendan who kept trying to sit on his head.  He'll be my challenge student!)  I am very proud of what they have learned so far from West Glocester's Mrs. Mountford, and the Dr. Day Care teachers before her.



This week we are studying shapes, so we went 3D shape hunting in the RV.




Looking forward to this "semester." :)

2 comments:

  1. Very impressive! i'm amazed by your dedication, Joanne! there's no way I could do what you're doing with the kids (somedays I can barely make it through bedtime rituals!). Brett says "thank you" to Brendan for the picture he sent, hope we can get those two together soon!

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  2. Thanks Ingrid! It is a work in progress for sure! Hope to get together soon!

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