Sunday night, Ben and I set up the school room in the "sitting room" (aka random room off our bedroom that was never used). We had talked about school room plans for months, but with the holidays and weeks of passing around colds, it didn't actually happen until the night before school was starting. The kids were very excited about having their own desks; I didn't think Eli would care, but I think it's made school a little more real for him.
Monday morning, Alison was as excited as Christmas morning. She was dressed and at her desk before 8 am! She had this dress set aside for weeks to wear on her first day of homeschool. She said it was going to be her uniform (daddy wears a uniform everyday, so she would too) but it only lasted 1 day.
It was a good week. It was hard, but a good hard, if that makes any sense. It was hard coming off of 2 weeks of colds and doing absolutely nothing, to a new schedule and routine. We jumped into working on chores and behavior on top of school and extra activities. The things that were challenging, were good things to work on and I know won't be challenging soon. We'll get in the groove of this schedule, it will just take some time. However, I was exhausted. A new tired hit me and I know the kids were feeling it too.
Proof: Eli fell asleep in his snack bowl on the way to the Y.
The best advice I got before starting school, was to set a schedule but do not assign specific times. Thankfully, this person knew me well enough that I would do that and knew that it would only take an hour for the whole schedule to crumble and I would be discouraged. We started school between 8 and 9 each morning and got everything done for our scheduled day without stressing about being 5 minutes late. By Thursday, I came upstairs to get dressed and found the kids had done their morning chores and started school all on their own without me telling them a thing. See? Good hard. The hard work of training them was good and paid off.
I was so thankful that the schedule I concocted actually worked and went pretty smoothly. In the morning, Alison does language arts, math, science and social studies on a computer program. While she does that, I work with Eli on letters, numbers and 'Before 5 in a Row'...it's a literature study that I did with Alison in preschool. You read one book every day for a week, and do different activities that go along with that book. One day we talked about the art the book used for illustrations and then made watercolor/collage pictures. The great thing is, Alison joined us for art time and they had fun painting together. Alison made a picture of Elsa's castle and Eli painted monsters eating snowflakes (it was supposed to be snow themed).
The set up of our room has worked really well. I love having the couch for our reading times, I write down Eli's work on the easel and the shelf holds all of our supplies.
I also have on the shelf, boxes of things for them to do when their done with school. There's things to craft or word search books or building paper airplanes or extra books to read.
This week, we also had a piano lesson, played basketball at the Y and went to the library.
One afternoon, Alison did a Pilates for kids video while the boys napped. She got really into it and it cracked me up watching her exercise.
When I asked the kids how they were liking homeschool, they had all positive things to say. Eli said that he likes that he gets to do more things. Alison said that she likes that it's quieter, there are less distractions, she can get her work done quicker and she gets to have lunch with me everyday. I was most surprised by Eli's answer because I didn't feel like we were really doing a ton. Looks like there was a lot more playing going on at that expensive preschool than I thought, and I already thought there was a lot.
Notice Colin wasn't in any of these pictures? Colin has always had a different rhythm than the other 2 and often sleeps later in the morning and takes a good nap in the afternoon. Most mornings he ate breakfast at the Elmo table in the school room and then watched Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood in another room until we were done. It worked for this week and I'm hoping it continues.
