Each year at the end of December I start our school planning for the next year. Part of that is taking the temperature of our homeschool thus far and deciding what to tweak in January, but I also look ahead to the fall. Now that we are knee deep in our grade 5 Waldorf year (we use the grade 5 story curriculum ~ I don't bother to keep track of what "grade" we are in for skills) and very happy to be back to using Waldorf methods I decided to take a look at what Live Education offers for grade 6, and wow, does it seem to be right up J-Baby's alley! Astronomy, Physics, Mineralogy, The Middle Ages, Ancient Greek and Roman History, and more Geometry? Sign us up! Or rather, I'll be saving my pennies for the books.
For the near term, I have our books for our first North American Geography block checked out from the library and have placed them on hold with T-Guy's account so we can have them through the end of January. I ordered the book that we need for February as it wasn't available from our city library or the county system.
J-Baby is excited to be starting lesson work again after our light month and holiday break. He is just old enough now to be worrying that he is perhaps a bit behind other kids when it comes to some of his skills, but talking him through it he realized that he is far ahead in many areas, especially science and history, and he really understands the why of things rather than just the what. The child is a deep thinker.
T-Guy, on the other hand, lives so much in the moment that he hasn't mentioned starting our lessons again. Right now his life revolves around playing with his new toys and trying to talk Papa (who is home all week) into playing Wii, or at the very least letting him and J-Baby play Wii. He's also thinking about his birthday which is in just a couple of weeks, and baseball, which starts gearing up in January with a two day camp, evaluations, and catching school (that is still a surprise); perhaps that is why he isn't thinking about school work.
As for me, I still have to fine tune our schedule for January. We are going to switch our "lite" day to Mondays, which seems counter-intuitive but we always struggle to get back in the groove on Mondays anyway, and that is when most of the homeschool group is able to meet. So we will do skills work in the morning, go to park day, then to the library, and finally do any necessary errands (health food store and banking).
Monday, December 27, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
And In the End ...
I decided to spend the past several weeks taking it easy. Not on break, but not doing a main lesson block or introducing new math material. We did history (The Story of the World), science (The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way), lots of reading, some math (applied math as well as review and story problems) and spelling, and of course health, PE, and lots of art/music.
And today was the last of it, and we are on break for three weeks (same as our local school district rather than what our charter school friends are doing). Of course, we're never really on break and certainly we'll do history, science, reading, PE, and art/music over the next three weeks, but I won't be thinking about it or worrying how and when we'll do it.
So coming up in January: more Life of Fred, a North American Geography block, more science, spelling, reading, literature, grammar, writing, PE, health, art, music, and whatever else we come up with!
And today was the last of it, and we are on break for three weeks (same as our local school district rather than what our charter school friends are doing). Of course, we're never really on break and certainly we'll do history, science, reading, PE, and art/music over the next three weeks, but I won't be thinking about it or worrying how and when we'll do it.
So coming up in January: more Life of Fred, a North American Geography block, more science, spelling, reading, literature, grammar, writing, PE, health, art, music, and whatever else we come up with!
Monday, December 06, 2010
Depleted
Way back when we were just starting the homeschooling journey one of the many benefits of homeschooling commonly touted by the veterans was how flexible homeschooling could be when life pitched you curve balls. Back then I couldn't imagine that I would need this flexibility, but in 2006 I faced a serious health crisis and a diagnosis of a chronic disease, in early 2007 my grandfather passed away, and in fall 2007 my mother died after a couple of months of hospitalization.
It was about that time that rhythmic homeschooling fell by the wayside in our home and we started to go with the flow of unschooling. It certainly has its benefits but I have written time and time again about the importance of rhythm to my family. We finally tamed all the chaos and got ourselves back into a solid homeschooling rhythm.
But last month another curve ball came our way. My grandmother had a (second) massive stroke and we made the decision to move her to my sister's for hospice care. Needless to say we weren't thinking about homeschooling. My grandmother passed away peacefully eight days later, and then there were plans to make and a trip to her old hometown so that she could be buried with my grandfather. Then I came home, but the work was only just starting. Only today was I even able to contemplate getting back on track with focused lesson work.
It hasn't been all play and no work for the boys; they have kept up reading, had their science lessons with Papa, attended a performance of The Tempest, watched several episodes of The Cosmos, practiced singing Christmas carols, played geography board games, knit a little, listened to audiobooks, worked on baseball skills, drawn, done some writing, discussed the most recent findings about the building blocks of life, and more. It is truly amazing how well unschooling works. Indeed, I find that it works really well for just about everything, excepting math and that rock solid rhythm that I like for us to have.
It is true that the flexibility of homeschooling can be a benefit in these cases; I was able to take my boys with me out of town without worrying about them missing school or keeping up with homework. But it also creates issues. My boys lost their daily rhythm and I had a hard time choosing between my responsibilities to them, giving the necessary help needed to my sister, and caring for myself. And as we all know, we tend to put ourselves last and that certainly happened with me.
So here I am with two weeks to go in what was planned as a short block to begin with. We lost the last week of our November Ancient Cultures block (but that was a four week block so we managed fine), had a week that was planned off anyway, and lost the first week of our first North American Geography block. I sat down today to do some planning and realized just how very depleted I am. All weekend was spent catching up on housework that hadn't been done while I was away as well as driving to my grandmother's storage unit and moving all of that to my house (five hours in the car yesterday after very little sleep). This morning I went for groceries, came home, and realized that I have nothing to go on.
For next couple of months I will be juggling being a full time homemaker, a homeschooling mother, a wife, and the executor of a living trust. Not taking care of myself isn't going to be an option; what sort of works in the very short term won't work at all with the added responsibility and stress I will have until my job is finished. I have to find a way to make it all work.
So now I have to decide what to do for the next two weeks. Get back into a basic rhythm but give up on the first geography block for now, rearranging our schedule to add an extra three weeks to our school year? Drop the Ancient Geometry block planned for January and move the geography block there? We've done some of it already and geometry will be thoroughly covered using Life of Fred, but this block looked fun(!). Keep Ancient Geometry but drop one Botany block since we did so much with it during the 2008-2009 school year? Go on full holiday now and start everything again in January, or get this next month of mathematics in?
Reading all those choices (which I just came up with as I was typing) I think the best choice may be to condense Botany into one block (knowing we've done some of it and that it will come up again in biology), giving me space to move the first North American Geography block to January and the Ancient Geometry block into February. We can spend the rest of this month reestablishing our morning rhythm with holiday crafting in place of the main lesson. That gets us back on track with daily math and spelling. I can breathe a bit and take my time planning the geography block rather than doing it by the seat of my pants, which is good because breath is what I need right now.
It was about that time that rhythmic homeschooling fell by the wayside in our home and we started to go with the flow of unschooling. It certainly has its benefits but I have written time and time again about the importance of rhythm to my family. We finally tamed all the chaos and got ourselves back into a solid homeschooling rhythm.
But last month another curve ball came our way. My grandmother had a (second) massive stroke and we made the decision to move her to my sister's for hospice care. Needless to say we weren't thinking about homeschooling. My grandmother passed away peacefully eight days later, and then there were plans to make and a trip to her old hometown so that she could be buried with my grandfather. Then I came home, but the work was only just starting. Only today was I even able to contemplate getting back on track with focused lesson work.
It hasn't been all play and no work for the boys; they have kept up reading, had their science lessons with Papa, attended a performance of The Tempest, watched several episodes of The Cosmos, practiced singing Christmas carols, played geography board games, knit a little, listened to audiobooks, worked on baseball skills, drawn, done some writing, discussed the most recent findings about the building blocks of life, and more. It is truly amazing how well unschooling works. Indeed, I find that it works really well for just about everything, excepting math and that rock solid rhythm that I like for us to have.
It is true that the flexibility of homeschooling can be a benefit in these cases; I was able to take my boys with me out of town without worrying about them missing school or keeping up with homework. But it also creates issues. My boys lost their daily rhythm and I had a hard time choosing between my responsibilities to them, giving the necessary help needed to my sister, and caring for myself. And as we all know, we tend to put ourselves last and that certainly happened with me.
So here I am with two weeks to go in what was planned as a short block to begin with. We lost the last week of our November Ancient Cultures block (but that was a four week block so we managed fine), had a week that was planned off anyway, and lost the first week of our first North American Geography block. I sat down today to do some planning and realized just how very depleted I am. All weekend was spent catching up on housework that hadn't been done while I was away as well as driving to my grandmother's storage unit and moving all of that to my house (five hours in the car yesterday after very little sleep). This morning I went for groceries, came home, and realized that I have nothing to go on.
For next couple of months I will be juggling being a full time homemaker, a homeschooling mother, a wife, and the executor of a living trust. Not taking care of myself isn't going to be an option; what sort of works in the very short term won't work at all with the added responsibility and stress I will have until my job is finished. I have to find a way to make it all work.
So now I have to decide what to do for the next two weeks. Get back into a basic rhythm but give up on the first geography block for now, rearranging our schedule to add an extra three weeks to our school year? Drop the Ancient Geometry block planned for January and move the geography block there? We've done some of it already and geometry will be thoroughly covered using Life of Fred, but this block looked fun(!). Keep Ancient Geometry but drop one Botany block since we did so much with it during the 2008-2009 school year? Go on full holiday now and start everything again in January, or get this next month of mathematics in?
Reading all those choices (which I just came up with as I was typing) I think the best choice may be to condense Botany into one block (knowing we've done some of it and that it will come up again in biology), giving me space to move the first North American Geography block to January and the Ancient Geometry block into February. We can spend the rest of this month reestablishing our morning rhythm with holiday crafting in place of the main lesson. That gets us back on track with daily math and spelling. I can breathe a bit and take my time planning the geography block rather than doing it by the seat of my pants, which is good because breath is what I need right now.
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