Today's title is courtesy Ian. I was sorta complaining about the fact that I cook up a good breakfast (egg and sausage burritos), just to have everyone hungry again and needing to stop doing schoolwork to eat two hours later. "That's how we roll, Mom!" Indeed it is. The hard part is regaining that energy we had before the snack break.
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| Daniel colored a picture of "Nick-a-pic-our-us" disguised as Spiderman |
How about a homeschool update? I haven't posted too much about how we are doing school lately, unless it is a fun activity like painting or bubble blowing... Remember how I
dropped out of our public school program last summer? And I had a great plan for
Ian and the
other kids? Well, just after things started to settle down after Christmas, I realized that we had completely lost all motivation. I was stuck in this terrible rut of having a crying baby and a homeschool method that required planning in advance. I had no planning time, only crying time. I needed some go-to-the-table-and-work-on-your-workbook materials. Luckily for me, my same coordinator had an opening and still had my lesson plans I submitted last spring. It was so easy to just slip right back into the program. The kids are motivated to get their work done because they don't want to get an unsatisfactory review from the school.
In addition to going back to our old method of schooling (reading history out loud together, language arts workbooks and math independently, recess), I've added a new component: notebooking! I really hate language arts workbooks and so do my kids. It is such a fragmented way of learning, especially writing. The workbook will teach, "This is an example of expository writing: a biography." Blank stares. "List people you could write a biography about." Groans "Rearrange these sentences in chronological order." Are we done yet? With notebooking, I just printed off some blank biography note book pages from notebookingpages.com, read a chapter in Story of the World (today was Copernicus and Galileo), and got the kids writing...
Each kid writes at their own level. Fiona wrote names, making sure to use capital letters, and one sentence that she dictated to me and then copied in her best handwriting. Evie practiced writing dates correctly and capitalizing country names, and learned how to put information in books in her own words. Shane wrote a list of interesting facts and then wrote a five sentence paragraph...a biography...about Copernicus. Don't they all look so peaceful and studious?
The truth behind the pictures is...it is so insanely loud around the table. You don't see Lula and Daniel, but they are there. Daniel almost always has some LOUD commentary or demand that I'm not listening to because I'm busy answering the LOUD questions from the other kids while Lula LOUDLY needs her shoes on or wants to color on someone's paper or wants the pencil someone else is writing with or wants to sit on my lap (Heidi is taking regular naps during our school morning now-yes, yes, yes!). "Do I HAVE to keep writing?" "How many sentence do I have to write?" "How do you spell..." "What? I can't hear you! So-and-so is being too LOUD!" Then Mark comes out for his breakfast and praises us all for our awesome one room schoolhouse method and all of a sudden, everyone was hungry and needed apples and and all that awesome momentum gets lost... and so do the kids when they run off to play...So I just get on my computer and start blogging...
