Friday, June 30, 2006

Starting Off Slowly Today

This morning has been one of those languid, lazy summer mornings. A morning lesson didn't happen, and it's not going to. We didn't walk the dog...I wanted to but Papa hung around this morning and soon we were all singing Beatles songs in the bedroom. I still need to take a nice aromatherapy bath (I sure wish I wasn't out of epsom salts).

I'm okay with where we are. I've decided to take a systematic approach to recontructing our school days. This weekend I'll do more planning, taking a close look at our natural rhythm so I can figure out how to add things in without it seeming rigid or forced. I need to talk to Papa about when we can be spontaneous and when we need to stick to the rhythm (it completely throws off our day when he goes to work late). I'm going to make a plan for learning the movement songs and activities. And then we are going to add in just one new activity every couple of weeks, be it a recorder lesson, watercolor painting, etc.

We're actually losing a lot of next week. Papa will be home Monday and Tuesday, and Tuesday will be filled with 4th of July activities. Wednesday we're going to the swim lagoon, and Thursday we're having our homeschool "park day" at a family's home. So we'll have only 3 days for schooling, and 2 of those will be afternoons only. I won't even try to add back in the practice time until the week after, other than playing a few games of sight word bingo and having number writing worksheets available. Also, we're not going to work with the number qualities of "11" and "12" since next week will be short.

2 comments:

  1. This is what I mean when I talk about getting thrown off. I feel like I must not have things set up in a supportive way if my husband coming homeearly could throw us so far off track. But it does. And then once we are off our rhythm it is like play double dutch jumprope where you are standing there with your hands up trying to find that pace so you can jump back in again. I can see that for me rhythm will always be the hardest yet most rewarding part of all this. I figure I will be really good at it when my kids are all grown up. LOL

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  2. When we are just talking the basic rhythm we can manage when Papa goes in late, comes home early, or takes a long lunch. The difficulty comes when the day is very full; if he stay home an extra hour in the morning we just don't have time to complete our chores, walk the dog (and do movement), have a snack, do our morning main lesson, snack again, and have free play (which to me is as important as anything else we do). Especially this time of year - if he is home until 9 a.m. it is probably too late for us to walk.

    I like the jumprope analogy!

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