Week Six: Schedule Overhaul

As you know, week before last was not my best week ever. Theo did all of his prescribed book work-- and more in fact, as I caught him at 9pm on Friday night practicing writing sentences while laid out on his stomach in the stairwell. But my "plans" for that week largely fell apart. The housework drove me hysterical (let's pretend I'm nesting) and the string of early mornings and long busy days finally caught up with me. I gave up on most of our morning routine and actually went to bed for the night at 6:30pm at one point. But somehow, Theo still got plenty of education and activity even without my trying.

However, after that week I decided on a few new "time-budgeting" rules. The first was that computer time must be strictly budgeted and scheduled. Luckily my internet has been a bit haywire for the last few weeks making it easier to enforce limits on my Facebook/gmail/blogger time. Take my advice--if you want to know the blissful peace of mind you used to have before political debates about GMOs and vaccine corporations got your blood pressure up on an hourly basis: turn your internet off for a few days. The withdrawal is not as bad as you might think--once I got over the impulse to give everyone a running commentary on my hilarious life.

Secondly, "school time" need not be budgeted into every little subcategory I can think of. In fact for the sake of sanity it's best to plan no more than one project or particular lesson in a week. This doesn't mean that in the length of a week I only actually teach my kid for one hour and leave him to do the rest himself. All it means is that I'm not panicking if my various plans didn't all happen. In fact, with fewer plans for the week, we tend to get more actual learning done with the materials we already have on hand and I'm less frantic about it because I don't feel pressed to make sure we do as many new activities in every subject area possible.

In any case even without allocating every parcel of "school time" to some new activity, we're already pretty busy. We have two scheduled regular outings a week: Mondays we go out for lunch in the afternoon with a friend and usually get groceries too. Fridays we have a regular date with Grandma. Everyday day of the week except for Friday we have a regular morning routine in which we do our calendar, read a Bible story, and Theo is given a certain number of writing and Math assignments for the day which he largely does unsupervised. (Friday is his "day off" from the workbooks). This leaves three days in the middle of the week in which I have ALL DAY to dig out new material or art projects or "practical life" kitchen projects for us to do. Or I take us on unplanned errands or outings, last minute trips to the aquarium or library, or a trip to get some school supply for a spur of the moment art project. But instead of planning those activities a week or more in advance, I let them happen naturally from what Theo seems to be interested in and what comes of the moment.

Besides, I had already learned that school sort of happens without you really trying-- as long as you stay off the computer and keep the telly off. As we did calendar on Thursday morning it occurred to me that Thursdays were garbage days and this sparked a whole "lesson" about recycling, compost, and garbage and we even got to go out and watch the fancy new trucks at work. Science field trip. We also got tons of Montessori Math work done. I introduced the Golden Beads again and we played the "Change Game"--which is basically to teach him how to exchange ten of one place value for one of the next. We even tackled some addition and at the end of it Theo was anxious to fill out his Numbers 1-100 chart-- which he sat dutifully filling out for half an hour after he'd completely all his other workbook pages. None of this was planned beyond the little note in my agenda "review Golden Beads."

He played with his atlas too and he even non-school playtime sparked little lessons. As his Playmobil vulture soared through the sky hurling threats of attack at Georgie's elephants, I happened to look up and say, "Theo, vultures aren't predators, they're scavengers-- they only eat animals that have already been killed by something else." "RAWR! You look yummy because you're ALREADY DEAD!!" Priceless.

They played a lot outside and did lots of "practical life"--which is to say he helped a lot with groceries and housework. My Dad is teaching him the Greek alphabet when he's at their house on Fridays and apparently reading through a book about birds of prey with Grandma sparked a Math lesson in which they laid out a measuring tape to see how big a 10 foot wing span really was. Because the sight of our Autumn picture on the kitchen wall regularly reminded Theo that red and yellow make orange he had taken to asking me at meals what mixing certain colours produced. This sparked a morning Art/Science lesson in which we experimented with colour mixing and I made up a colour wheel and other colour charts for him to look at. We learned primary, secondary, and complimentary colours, warm and cool colours, how to make brown, what happens when you add black or white to a colour and while the creative part was of little interest to him, he was thrilled to be able to read the charts I made for his regular reference.

Finally, I decided that I needed to budget at least a little time for housework once a week. "Practical Life Day" as I like to call it, involves the usual routine, but no intended lessons once Theo is finished his workbooks for the day. Mommy attacks her "to do" list and lets "the students" have the rest of the day off. Of course learning still happens without me or amidst my chores anyway, but the main business of the day is housework which the kids either take part in or else go amuse themselves while I get it done. We do this Thursdays-- the last day before our end of the week outing. You may ask "What sane person wants housework time?" but I found it entirely necessary if I didn't want to look like Mrs. Bennet on Saturday morning. The affect of this innovation to the schedule was immediate. I felt calmer at the end of each day as I relaxed in a less chaotic environment and the inclusion of regular housework in my week turned out to be an excellent example to the kids. I had Theo sweeping the back patio and clearing things up automatically when he was done. The fact that I completely re-organised the school room and the play room so that things were easily accessible and had a proper place (as opposed to being left loose on a shelf or bunged in a basket on the floor) made a big difference. The kids are now independently cleaning up after themselves on a regular basis all day. Bliss.