Teacher Notes

This week we had the typical extreme weather that’s common in our parts.  The early part of the week it was warm and lovely.  The last part of this week it’s been cold and snowy.  My family is fond of both, so it’s been a happy week.

It’s normally hard to push my kids outside, but the early part of the week it was so lovely to be out there, that I merely had to suggest it.  That was fun that they wanted to be out there so much.  One day, I was really busy working on household and computer things in the morning, and decided to do school while the 2 little ones were napping.  We did it out in the kids’ fort attached to the swingset in the yard!

They got such a kick out of that!  Well, David asked if he could do his math in the leaf pile, which of course I had to let him just so he could say he did it.  He made a little leaf pile chair for himself and promised me good handwriting.  He did not disappoint.  Well, I will say the kids did take longer to get through their work than normal, but it was a beautiful experience for all 3 of us, and I wouldn’t take it back for anything.

It was one of those things that I just needed to do.  I needed to show all of us in this family why we are homeschooling.  I needed to stretch our wings and do something fun.  As we memorized different categories of taxonomy, surrounded by nature, all 3 of us were just smiling.  The kids spent time outside exploring far after our “seatwork” was completed.

Thursday, was our tricky day, but we pushed on.  A few factors really threw us off.  First, it was David’s birthday!  He turned 7, and that seems unreal.  His party isn’t until Sunday, but we had some plans for brownies after supper and opening packages from my family that came in the mail.

Anyway, he somehow thought he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to do on his birthday, which was untrue.  He thought the dog didn’t need to be taken out.  He thought he didn’t need to do his reading.  Really, he just complained all day how I was ruining his birthday.  That part was not fun.  He did end up doing everything he was supposed to, but math took him over an hour because he kept wandering off.  He kept saying he was done with a job, and I would show him he skipped half of it.  Reading was frustrating because he was struggling over words that he’s known for over a year.  I could tell his brain was just not turned on.  That was frustrating for me.

Silje was not too much better that day.  We went head to head over handwriting, which ended up taking 45 minutes instead of the normal 15.  She was getting her cursive “a” backwards (a letter she’s gotten perfectly in the past weeks), and I asked her to write it 5 times by itself, and then write it again in the word.  She kept saying “I did my best, why do I have to try again?”  I kept saying “Because we’re going to make your best better.  We don’t do school just to see what you can do, but teach you to do more.  I thank you for doing your best.  Now let’s make it better together.”  She was mad about it, and so her letters kept getting darker, and sloppier, so I made her do it again…and again.  Once she reigned in her annoyance, she got it perfectly.   

I feel like I deal with that quite often with her, which is another reason we homeschool.  Silje is so smart.  She’s very smart.  She’s used to understanding things the first time, and doing it right the first time.  That’s her normal.  When she doesn’t get something right the first time, she gets really flustered and frustrated.  My goal is to show her that it’s okay to work at something.  It doesn’t mean she’s stupid or she’s not capable.  Work is okay, and work is normal, whatever level you’re at.

The good thing about that morning was that it snowed!  Nothing accumulated of course, as it’s still too warm.  However, that was a welcome distraction from the craziness of that morning.  The other 2 factors making that morning off is I had a splitting headache.  Knut got up with Solveig that morning, but plopped her in our bed where I was sleeping while he got dressed.  Solveig in her silly state head butted me when I was laying there and it hurt so bad!  I had a headache all morning, and didn’t feel I could take anything good for it.  It basically made me the grump of the day, which was tough on David’s birthday.

The thing that saved us, is that harvest was delayed in the morning due to the snow and moisture.  That means Knut was home until lunch.  While I was a grump sipping coffee, Knut made pancakes for David with chocolate chips and sprinkles, and made the morning generally fun.  He’s very much a morning person.  It’s one of his few faults.  However, that morning, I think we needed it.

I did feel a bit of pressure having him around for school, though.  He wanted to observe and see what we were doing, and they were not doing well.  It was a birthday, and Daddy was around, and it was snowing and it was actually pretty chaotic due to the lack of concentration from the kids.  I wanted to show Knut that we do actually do school, and how hard we work, and so I just didn’t let up.  It worked out fine, and we got a lot of good things done.  The kids weren’t concentrating, but I could tell they were holding back any rebellion with Daddy’s presence in the house.  I’m not sure how much the kids actually absorbed through that, though. 

I went through our curriculum schedule, and I was pleasantly surprised that we’re actually not behind at all.  I’ve gotten it stuck in my head that we’re doing terribly, and we’ll need to make up a bunch.  I was worried that by just doing a bit day by day (as much as I’ve thought we could handle) we couldn’t possibly be keeping up.  Turns out we were.  Whew! It turns out the only thing I wasn’t doing was keeping on top of was the schedule, but we were keeping on top of the work, and I guess that’s all that matters anyway.

So overall, it was a good week.  We had fun, we pushed through, we actually aren’t behind like I thought we were.