Homeschool Friday

This week of homeschooling has been mirroring the laid back attitude that I’ve been trying to have with things lately. Silje is still getting her work done, of course. We’ve been working on Egypt some more for the first part of the week, and moved onto the ancient civilization on the island of Crete on the latter part of the week. I believe we will go back to Egypt, but first do a brief overview of the various ancient civilizations. I believe we’re supposed to hit the Indus Valley ancient civilization next.

The neatest thing that we finally are getting into is our timeline book. It’s just a large blank timeline that’s in book form. You can make notes about the things you study and write when they happened as you learn them. It helps set some context to know things like who ruled different countries at the same time. She caught on really quickly to what B.C. and A.D. means, and knows that B.C. dates count down to the birth of Christ, and A.D. counts up after the birth of Christ. I don’t think I learned that until 5th grade? Maybe? Anyway, she gets it, and won’t let me pass a single date given in our textbook without writing it down in our time line book.

In math, she’s learning how to tell time on a regular clock. Right now we’re just getting the hour hand down, and I think I actually expected her to know some of this better, but it all seemed to be new information for her. She’s also getting into odds and evens.

English grammar I actually haven’t been on top of as much as I should be. We’re still about 2 weeks ahead of schedule, and I think it’s been bad that I sometimes skip it on crazy busy days since we are so far ahead. The last half of this week I’ve been doing a bit better with that. Thursday was really good, though, because she’s been working on writing her own sentences and she desires so much to create stories and fill her journal.

Her desire to create has really shone in other subjects as well. While practicing the piano this last week, she said “Mommy, I want to learn all the notes so well that I can write my own songs!” For afternoon activities this week, I let her sculpt with some play dough while I got supper ready (something I don’t let her do nearly enough) and she just went to town making the most creative things.

Knut just recently refilled the bird feeder outside our kitchen window, which has drawn some birds I’ve actually never seen by our house before. We’ve seen a blue jay and a red-headed woodpecker (that was really cool!) Silje has begun to take a pencil and blank notebook over to the kitchen table, and sits and sketches the birds that she sees. It was her own idea, and she did it completely independently.

I feel bad I haven’t been doing the crafts that I’ve been planning to do with her that somehow got dropped with other electives when I was sick a few weeks ago. I really ought to add those back in. Her desire to create things is just oozing from her lately!

She’s starting to prefer to do her work on the couch in the living room in front of the fireplace as opposed to the dining room table. I’ve let her do that, until I saw a big slide in her handwriting again, so we’re back to the table at least for the writing assignments.

Going over the curriculums, I see that we’re soon approaching the half year mark in 2 subjects. What? Didn’t we just start?

I’ve reorganized the day from what I had originally scheduled it out to be. So far it’s working well for me, but I haven’t asked Silje’s opinion on it yet. Basically before I was planning on alternating subjects that she could do independently with subjects that she needed one on one time with. I’ve changed that into 2 clumps now.

We start the day together doing our devotions/Bible reading and then I hand her a stack of her worksheets that she needs to complete that day. (This includes her Bible coloring pages, which she LOVES, a piece of handwriting paper to write out her memory verse, her spelling words worksheet, and sometimes her math worksheets [although sometimes we need to “do” a teaching math lesson first, and then I do it later in the day.])

During that independent work time, I start the house off for the day. If we need bread, I start some in the breadmaker. Almost always a load of laundry needs to be started. I clean up the kitchen for the morning, check my email, attempt to get dressed, and get the boys set up with some fun activity. When she’s done with her independent work, we go over it together and discuss things that she may have gotten wrong, or finally figured out. Then we sit and read through her history/geography lesson, and do the activities which usually involves searching our map, writing on the timeline, but most often she has so many questions, and I do my best to answer them. If she stumps me too many times, we schedule a trip to the library as soon as I can manage it that week.

Grammar is also a subject that we do together, as well as the read alouds, which normally, or not so normally gets put somewhere into the day, but not necessarily the “school” portion of the day.

I think I’m happy to be falling into some kind of routine after being sickish for a month or so. My goals for this next week will include getting back on top of some of our electives like Chinese and sewing, as well as relying less on the t.v. for the boys. Usually the time I spend with Silje one on one, is less than an hour, and often I feel left with no choice but to hypnotize the boys with some show, which 95% of the time is PBS kids.

However, the more I rely on the t.v. the more difficult they all are to handle throughout the rest of the day, and they’re just wearing me out! It’s almost as if they forget how to just play after watching t.v. at some point in the morning, and follow me around and whine once it gets turned off. A few times this week, I’ve left the one on one work until Elias’ afternoon nap time, so I only have to worry about keeping David occupied while I work with Silje. (Which is much much easier!) I could go into a whole post about this struggle, but I think it seeps out of a homeschool topic and into a straight parenting topic, so I’ll save it for another day.