Homeschool Friday

It’s one of those weeks weeks where I feel the need to quote Dickens and say “It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times.” However, that seems a bit overly-dramatic.

We had a tough day on Monday.  Silje didn’t want to finish an assignment I had given her, and she was willing to put up a fight about it.  It was a silly word search that I normally give her just for fun.  However, this time, for the sake of perseverance, I told her when I gave her the worksheet that I wanted her to find each and every word.  She had to do the whole thing.

First, she asked half way through if she could be done.  No.  Then came the every 2 minute excuses and off the wall questions.  I had to finally leave the room and tell her she could not come and get me until she was done.  With only half of it done, she came to me 2 minutes later with it “done.”  Now, I’m not a simpleton.  I knew she couldn’t finish the second half in 2 minutes, so I said, “Great!  Let’s check your work together!”  Ironically, the first word on the list couldn’t be found circled.  Neither could the second.  Or third.  In fact, there were several letters in the word search that were circled but didn’t actually make up a word.

Silje played it cool.  She tried to have an innocent “oops” look upon her face, but I wasn’t falling for it.  The point to me wasn’t that her entire education hung on the fact that she could find vocabulary words from her Bible lesson mixed in with random letters.  I really couldn’t care less about that.  Silje enjoyed these types of worksheets, and that’s usually the only reason we do them.  The point was, I had pointed out at the very start that the expectation was that she finish an assignment from start to finish, and push over the hump of boredom, or difficulty.  To me, it was a lesson I had set up in perseverance.

What came of it?  She tried to get out of it.  Then she lied/cheated about finishing it, which had to have it’s own set of consequences.  For the worksheet, I erased all of the incorrect marks on the page and made her finish.  For real this time.  O, she was mad.  She probably stared at that stupid, stupid word search for over an hour with a clenched fist around her pink pencil.  She wasn’t doing it, but she was staring at it because she thought that was somehow obeying me this time.  Her attitude plummeted, and we had to work through that anger for hours afterward.

I suppose now that I think about it, if that’s our worst day of homeschooling thus far, as far as behavior/attitude problems, then I’d say we’re doing fantastic!  Lessons were learned.  I don’t plan on doing another word search for a little while.  The rest of the week we had great school times.  As amazing as Silje is, and as much as she blows us away with her maturity and intellect, and just plain awesomeness, she’s still just a kid.  We have to remind ourselves of that sometimes.

Silje, Knut and I are still in the process of adjusting to the expectations of what homeschooling is like.

For Silje, it’s easy to focus on the negative, (although I don’t mean for this to come out making her look awful.  She handles things usually WAY better than I ever would).  Maybe I should say, when any of us are put in any given situation, it’s natural to focus on the hard part of it, and how people on the other side of the fence have it so much better.

You see, the one thing I didn’t get at first when looking into homeschooling is the time on the hands of homeschool students.  Last year, she spent 2 hours a day just on her school bus.  2 hours.  Now that’s a pretty typical school day!  That’s not counting recess, standing in lines, lunch breaks, etc.  She was basically gone from 7am to 4:30pm for kindergarten 3 days a week.  The idea of losing our Tuesdays and Thursdays terrified me.  When on earth would she have time to be apart of our family?  We would just have to add one activity like piano lessons or ballet for our whole family to rarely be together for supper.  What would happen with multiple kids having multiple activities…it was like watching my children’s childhood flash before my eyes.

Homeschooling is different in the aspect that Silje can get more learning done in 2 hours one on one with me than all day at “real school.”  It makes sense.  One on one just goes faster.  However, that leaves her with more time on her hands than the typical 1st grader.  For that reason, there are 2 things (well, I’m sure more than that, but 2 things relative to this post) that Silje does more of than the average 1st grader: chores and play.

Silje helps me out a lot.  A lot.  She helps me pick up.  She tells me when disaster is about to strike with one of the boys and I’m distracted.  She does dishes sometimes (although she’s supposed to do them every day and I usually only have her do them 1-2 times a week).  She takes care of Lena more than any other family member.

Before you have labor people knocking down my door, I’ll add that she gets to play more than the average 1st grader too.  She will often build a couch cushion fort, have a tea party, or pretend she’s a butterfly before school starts in the morning.  She has declared Thursdays “pretend I’m a cat day” in which she likes to pretend she’s a cat all day.  I mean, it usually only lasts about an hour or so, but she tries to be consistent about it.

She has so much time to play!  We had the “best of times” last Wednesday putting together felt Christmas ornaments in preparation for the upcoming season.  We used cookie cutters as templates, and traced and cut out shapes.  Then I let her sew on little crystal seed beads all over the front of the ornament.  (This was her first “real” sewing project as she got to use a traditional needle and thread and tiny little seed beads from my own stash.) We were both in heaven, and I was so excited to see her trace, cut, embellish and sew the fabric with her own hands! Then I taught her the basic running stitch and she pieced together the front and back and then stuffed it full of polyfill.

It was a blast, and we’ll be doing a lot more of these ornaments before Christmas comes.  I decided not to show pictures yet for 2 reasons: the ones I have taken haven’t turned out that well, and because some of them may turn into fabulous Christmas gifts.

I try to explain to her when she complains about her chore load that sure…she does a lot of work around the house.  She does have chores.  Every kid has (or should have!) chores.  However, she gets a lot of things that other kids don’t get either: time.  I’m sure if she came off the bus at 4:30, tired, cranky, hungry, I would not make her do the dishes before supper.  On the flip side of the day, when she had to meet the bus at 7am and we rushed to get her a good breakfast, hair brushed and mittens on, we didn’t have time to make sure that Silje let the dog out to go potty and got food and water.

I’m beginning to realize that her complaining a bit more about doing chores is just that: a kid complaining about doing chores.  She doesn’t have too much on her plate and the majority of her day is free play time/free learning time.  While I do admit, she probably does more than if she went to school, she does play way more at home too.  So I guess if she were being as overly dramatic as her mother, she would refer to it as “the best of times and worst of times” as well!