Getting Ready for Homeschooling

Sunday, January 4th 2009

I had planned all along to start Monday, the day all the other kids are going back to school after the winter break. How do you make god laugh? Make a plan.

Last week we got word that Aunt Jeanne (or Great Aunt or Great Great Aunt, depending on your generation) had passed. She was in her nineties and it wasn’t unexpected. Now I am not at all close with the Maine end of the family. In fact I have barely met most of them. My dad is not the most social of creatures and he is my connection to them. Normally I would not think to run to the funeral of someone I haven’t seen in 15 years, but my dad was flying up from Florida and tickets to NYC are far cheaper than to Portland. Besides, Rocket Boy has never met them and I thought it would be good for him to recognize that he has other family, so we packed the car and off we went.

We got to Maine on Friday night for the wake, Saturday was the funeral and then up to my Dad’s house Downeast.

I had planned to do some shopping to set up our new homeschooling system, could be done in Maine just as well, right? So Sunday night I ended up in that store I usually swear never to go into, but I got what I needed. Because RocketBoy has only just turned 6 and he is the precious, precious child I love so much, I knew that I would need some visual and tactile way of organizing our day or I would be sunk. We’re using cards and wallet insert that holds credit cards. Each card has a subject and represents a half hour (math x2, science and nature x2, reading and writing x2, social studies x1, computer x1, TV x2, exercise x1, choose & do x2). I let RocketBoy choose a card, and put it inside the zipper part of the insert and we work on that subject next. Pair that with a stopwatch and we have a nice orderly way to go through our day that allows me to meet my targets and RocketBoy to feel like he’s got some measure of control. I don’t imagine that we’ll use all the cards every day and we may end up adding more cards as we work the kink out.

I originally wanted to make the cards sized to correspond to a daily schedule sheet, so we could keep easier track of stuff. In this ad hoc situation we don’t have that together yet. Let’s see how it works.