Busy busy busy

When we originally made the choice to homeschool the number one reason was flexibility for our family's schedule. In fact it was Daddy in particular who "decided" that we had to go the homeschool route for the very specific reason that it was too difficult, and more importantly, too expensive for him to take his holiday during the summer school vacation. He didn't want his life and our lives as a family to be run by the public school schedule. Of course we both had many other reasons for wanting to homeschool and soon discovered many unexpected benefits of the choice, but in the beginning the big selling point was flexibility for our schedule.

Well the last few weeks we have been taking full advantage of this flexibility in that almost every week for the last 4 (or more) we've had something come up--planned or unplanned--which disrupted the "normal" school schedule. Midwife appointments, home teacher visits, trips to see family in the States, weekend parties to be prepared for, or just frantic trips to the grocery store to buy coffee.

This is where homeschooling really allows for me to not use a car. I can't drive, and even if I could, we could never afford two cars. If we weren't homeschooling I wouldn't have the time to get everything done--it takes me over 2 hours just to make a grocery run. I don't mind this-- it gives me a chance for exercise (I walk) and it gives the kids a chance to either read in the trailer or enjoy the walk too--plus it gives them practice pitching in when it comes to running the household.  They get a very good education it what it takes to run a household--something the public school system has woefully over-looked and I'm sure must be responsible for many ailments we now suffer from in the west--like the habitual use of Mc Donald's for "food." Without homeschooling I would never have the time to walk an hour to get to Superstore, which means our evenings or weekends would be spent dragging an exhausted, short-tempered, probably hungry Daddy out to the shops to wrangle over-tired kids in a busy public place while we try to remember where the hell marmite is (hint: Superstore thinks it's related to baker's yeast and keeps it in the baking aisle). After a very stressful visit we would drag the kids home and probably get them to bed late making for an even crappier day following. Thankfully, I have plenty of flexibility to do everything from grocery runs to library visits to full-on family holidays and parties--and manage all the housework and errands largely myself. When 6:30pm rolls around I can relax for the rest of the evening.


However, there is a downside. With all this flexibility we get very very busy very very fast. In fact, I had a look at my schedule for December and discovered that I was "booked" every weekend between now and Christmas. I'm also into my 3rd trimester which means more trips to the midwife--a whole afternoon's project really. With so much on the "schedule"--and more continually being added to it--I start to feel a lot less motivated to keep up with the school schedule. What this amounts to is me being too tired in the mornings to get us off to a decent start and being too distracted by the demands of my ginormous "to do" list to plan or prepare much for Theo to do. Of course work still gets done and learning still happens all the time (as I write this he is reading through 6 different books about various kinds of snakes which he got out of the library). But I am a lot more disengaged from the schooling and unfortunately Theo has begun to get the idea that HE gets to decide what work he does.

This week and last he did a lot of Math-- his favourite. And I will say this: I really like his Horizon Math book so far. It's colourful and it's thorough and it introduces concepts in various kinds of exercises but it also repeats every kind of exercise several times before it begins to build on the concept and increase the complication. This week Theo started double digit addition of static equations, telling time by 15, 30, and 45 minutes on an analog clock, fractions, counting by 2s backwards, and measuring by inches with a ruler. The only disadvantage of the Horizons book is that it's American and therefore teaches measurement only in imperial. But even that I think will turn out alright. I don't recall learning imperial in school and it gave me some trouble later as most Canadian trades deal in imperial, not metric. Imperial strikes me as more difficult to learn as well since it uses fractions as opposed to decimal  points, so I'm just as happy that he will be learning imperial now. I can easily supplement him with metric later.

He also did some music with his grandparents and playing Christmas music around the house has got him humming all the time-- I'm relieved to find that he is not tone deaf at all, simply too self conscious to sing on demand. Greg and I are working on a plan to include some of the Sunday school kids in the choir which could help.

He worked through a lot of his Geography book last week and for our party he did lots of baking. I may suck at this whole craft thing, but baking is excellent as a teaching tool. It's art, it's practical skills, it's Math and Science. Cutting out cookies and placing them on a baking sheet became a lesson in multiplication, measuring ingredients is a lesson in fractions, rolling dough and decorating is creative. We get something done which serves a greater purpose than getting stuck to my kitchen wall and as a bonus I don't have to buy and store a lot of craft material in the house. We will be doing a lot of cookie baking this year.

But except for baking and Math we really didn't do much school last week. Black Friday truly was that. There were meltdowns and arguments and I couldn't get him to focus on work for more than 5 mins. So this week I'm doing my best to stay organized and write down a lesson plan for everyday-- however loosely I choose to interpret it later on. If I have it in black and white in my planner then hopefully that will be enough to keep us on track.