<p>I should start wearing a joker's hat or riding a unicycle because my life is a complete circus. Or a juggling act. Or a joke. At least these are the thoughts that occur to me when we haven't done any school work, my daughter has no pants on, Eustace has been crying all day, company is come for dinner, and I am still in my pjs at four pm.
The real problem is that we kind of stopped doing school before Pascha because, well, Theo finished everything. Ok he finished grade one math. And all the science projects I devised in January. And his reading and writing have become too advanced for me to want to bother making him do his language arts work. Plus our swimming got cancelled. Which leaves me with nothing to do for the rest of the year except a few geography pages. My hopes for doing a gardening unit have been squashed by having to hold Eustace pretty much all the time. If by some miracle he sleeps longer than 20 minutes in the swing I need to be doing housework. Or remembering to eat. Or showering. Not puttering in the garden.
I did however finally order Theo's next year's curriculum for the most part. We have everything we plan on using except his next math book, his French course, and his science books. But we have a brilliant history curriculum, a much better language arts curriculum, some fun encyclopedias, and even a cursive writing course which he has been rather enjoying already. We even found some brilliant material to help Georgie learn her numbers and letters. But since my hands are always full ( at present I am rocking a fussy baby whilst thumb-texting this post on my phone...after skipping dinner) I really feel torn about what sort of routine to start next. I had not planned on making Theo do school all summer and I can hardly imagine the point of starting him on new material a month before school ends, especially when the baby is keeping me so busy. On the other hand, I'm excited about the new material and I have more or less run out of stuff to do with him. So I'm sort of stuck in the middle of things here and wondering if it would be a bad idea to just call it a year and spend June playing outside, learning to do chores, and going on "field trips".
On the plus side, Georgie is now officially registered for preschool next September. This means that three mornings a week Georgie gets a more social form of education which will give her the interaction and direction she seems to crave, and during which I can spend two hours at the library around the corner getting Theo through his more formal lessons without distraction. It's the perfect solution. It will give Theo the time and space he needs to concentrate, it will give Georgie something fun and social to do, and it will give me the structure in my week and the regular exercise that I need to keep from panicking. Plus there's plenty to do with babies at the library as well. Whenever I feel tempted to move continents just to get away from various oppressive aspects of our current residence, I remind myself that at least our library is awesome. Getting Georgie into a cheapish preschool two minutes away from it is such a relief.
Will I put Georgie in public school people keep asking me? No. At least I plan to homeschool her just like Theo, challenging as she is at times, especially since she learns very very differently than Theo and is not nearly close to his level academically speaking (though she is smart in her own way).
The real trouble with her at the moment is not only that she craves interaction while Theo craves space and time to concentrate, but that she can't take any extracurricular activities with Theo until they are both school age. Her concentration and interest in schoolwork are getting better and better, but while she is under 5 she can't take any activities at the same time as Theo. She is in the preschool group and Theo is in the primary school group. Which is a considerable problem as I can't drive and the kids need more to do together. I am perfectly happy to restrict the "school time" to under two hours per day if the kids are able to make good use of both school time and spare time. But if they can't take swimming, dance, drama, or martial arts together that makes it very difficult to fit in quality schoolwork, errands, extracurricular activities and interactive play all in one day. At the moment they need both more time to play together and more space apart so Theo can work uninterrupted. Once Georgie is old enough for kindergarten they will do a lot more extracurricular activities together and school time will be less of a fight. I have every confidence that over the next year Georgie will learn the enough to make it possible for me to coordinate their lessons without distracting Theo from his more advanced work. She is already interested in his history and language lessons since they are more interactive than self directed. What I need at the moment is time to get Theo into a routine. Hopefully by the time Georgie is ready for kindergarten I will have come up with a plan for dealing with a toddler as well!
Did I mention we want four kids?
Okay, here's my opinion:
ReplyDeleteThe most important things to establish in kindergarten are letter and number literacy. Obviously, Theo has both! So, you can call it a year and not feel guilty. I have often finished at the beginning of June and although I've had intentions of doing a bit of school work throughout the summer rarely do. However, my kids have needed very little review in the fall and in fact usually skip most of the review lessons in their math.
If you want to give Theo some science projects relating to gardening that you can manage with no free hands, here's a couple ideas. Grow sprouts in the kitchen window. Plant sunflowers. Theo could keep a simple journal drawing their progress each day and include weather observations and neither of these require much work on your part!
Here's a link to a blog chronicling nature journaling with children (there's also lots of other good stuff there).
http://project-based-homeschooling.com/camp-creek-blog/art-lesson-nature-journal