Homeschooling has been rough the past couple of weeks. I’ve started physical therapy for my knee, but it’s Monday and Wednesday mornings (through the canyon, 45 minutes away), and despite leaving the kids with schoolwork at another homeschool family’s house, we’re obviously not getting as much done as if we were doing school all morning at home! So I made the executive decision to step back from CBS while I’m doing PT, and all of our Bible study leaders were really supportive when I told them last week. Since we normally do a four day week and set aside Thursdays for CBS, park day, and errands, we’ve suddenly gained a whole new school day. Yesterday was my monthly meeting with Sue, our wonderful Inspire teacher. Technically, her job is to check in on us and make sure we’re doing our work, but since we are, in her words, “a rockstar homeschool family,” the accountability part only takes 5 minutes, and the rest of our hour is mentoring and encouragement. Sue has been homeschooling for almost 20 years, she’s from the Midwest, and she totally shares my values and goals in homeschooling. She encourages me to think beyond textbooks to lifestyle learning, she loves engaging the kids on what they’re learning from reading and projects, and she always reminds me that everything is pointing them towards loving learning. She has hilarious stories about what her kids did at my kids’ ages, and I always come away refocused on us all loving learning!
This morning, I told the kids I’d read aloud for half an hour (because we’re STILL plugging away at Robin Hood–next read-aloud is going to be about 200 pages SHORTER!), then I’d set the timer and we’d all work hard on seatwork for an hour, then we’d do kit boxes for school the rest of the day. They were very enthusiastic about this plan. Reading aloud went great, but it’s hard to do intense instruction with both of the girls AND Tommy in an hour. Just not realistic. Fortunately, a lot of Tommy’s work is self-directed at this point, but we didn’t get to spelling for him or Elizabeth. I simultaneously did phonics with Susie and narration/summary/dictation with Elizabeth, which made for some interesting confusion. Then I simultaneously did math with both girls (some, some went away stories with Susie; estimating large numbers with Elizabeth), which was crazy. Then our timer went off, and I had to call it quits for formal schoolwork for the day. We almost caught up on the work from the rest of the week, and I am going to try to combine a few more things tomorrow so we start next week on top of things. Then Susie pulled out her latest Ivy Kids box, and everyone wrote secret messages with white crayons and painted over them with watercolors. That actually kept Janie busy for a good hour plus. Tommy got out a Tinker Crate he got for his birthday and made a lava lamp, Elizabeth painted a digeridoo from her Cultured Owl Australia kit, and Susie translated hieroglyphics into English with her Little Passports Egypt kit. Lots of learning happening, I made homemade bread for lunch, and everyone is in a good mood. I think we have a new end-of-the-week tradition!
