A friend told me recently that someone she knew schools through the summer and takes the fall off. Another friend once started right up in early summer and was finished when the weather turned nice for spring. Between being on my MOPS leadership team, flag football, homeschool co-op and my husband being deployed, that doesn't sound like too bad of an idea, this taking a school break during the busy school year.
My planner is always looking way too full for this stay-at-home mom I like to do all the fun stuff going on...base events, church events, homeschool group events, MOPS events. I like to do the preschool stuff that is for my girls...open gymnastics class, library story time, play dates with other moms with preschoolers. I like to take my boys to their own Bible study group. I like to help out friends who need meals, childcare, and just a friend to hang out with sometimes. I like to have a clean house when I host the weekly Bible study group at our house.
All of these are good things. And I have a hard time saying no when something fun comes up. But I'm getting better. Some weeks. I've actually given up some activities this year that I really enjoyed. But I find us making up school we've missed during the week on the weekends more often than I'd like to. Not whole days worth of school, but a spelling tests or letter writing that we didn't get to during the week...math that didn't get finished because a child asked for a break and it was forgotten for the rest of the day.
My dad is still visiting and I've tried to take advantage of him keeping the girls occupied on the backyard swing set to actually keep up with school this week. It went pretty well.
Virginia becoming a colony got attention this week. My first grader is getting better at having a good attitude about having to write so much, which makes the time he spends on it much shorter.
We also gave attention to the king of France during this time period. Christopher's notebook summary...
And Matthew's notebook summary.
In our 2nd/3rd grade supplement book, Pioneers and Patriots, we read about a French family in America and how they would carry their canoes from one river to the other to travel. So we made our own canoes. Not very waterproof, but a big hit with my children.
And we can't go very long with Legos getting added to whatever we do. :)
By the way, I'm not going completely crazy from busyness....most days. I still have down time at the end of the day, once all of the kids are in bed or at least in their rooms by eight to read or blog or watch a movie and sometimes clean or do laundry. :) I get to Skype with my hubby regularly and I've started calling all of my kiddos into bed with me when I wake up to start our day by praying together (which I really recommend you if can't seem to get them all together once everyone is up). I take a shower most days and what keeps me sane most of all...I talk to God throughout my day.
I often tell my friend that I don't know how larger homeschool families accomplish so much. I homeschool two kids and struggle with some of the same things you do - taking a break and then forgetting to come back to the task from which we took a break. Even worse, we don't spend any weekends making up work. But, since we don't have co-op right now, we often spend Mondays making up from the prior week. It's not ideal, but at least we have that extra day.
ReplyDeleteHopefully, I will write about our last few weeks soon. I just can't seem to keep up with the blogging.