Week 1, we survived, despite my exhaustion

September 11, 2009

Homeschool Year 2, Week 1

Survived the first week, despite my own crushing exhaustion. In terms of getting ready for baby, I’m not quite there yet, so there’s still an extra burden on top of the usual load of school, cooking, and housekeeping. To top it all I had two nights in a row (!) of being social. Needless to say it was just too much. I’ve been tired, super tired.

Even so, we have managed to have good, productive days of school, even if they’re not terribly inspired. We’ve been doing pages from our Learn At Home 1st Grade Workbook – at least 8 pages a day. In addition I’ve had him do independent reading – at least an hour a day. He’s been reading comic books, which I am all in favor of. He loves them and the ones he’s been reading are rather melodramatic, which means he’s asking me about all sorts of words that are far beyond his reading level: here’s a smattering of the words on the first few pages of the Justice League comic he was reading: descended, engulfing, lurked, saturated, overwhelmed, frantically, avail, emerged, petrified, elaborate, utilize. He did well sounding them out and we talked about their meanings and how to figure out their meanings from the context. Not bad for a 6 year old.

This week we also started homeschool soccer again. It felt good to be welcomed and recognized, but I can see that I need to help Rocketboy learn how to play with others. During their free play time I could see he was having a hard time integrating with the others, until the end when he steped away from the rougher boys and had a rocking game of freeze tag with three girls near his own age.

Writing is still a problem – moving him to extreme whining and nearly to tears at least twice this week. I pushed for him to finish the exercises and made sure he got huge amounts of praise when he finally got past the “I can’t do it” wall. The wall we hit on Thursday was particularly bad and getting past it had him happily high-fiving me. I had hoped that success would carry through a good feeling for the next day, but today we hit that can’t do it wall yet again, though with slightly less force, but only slightly.

I have enrolled him in a partner writing course – he gets paired with a 10 year old homeschooler and together they are creating a story, with the 10 year old doing all the actual pencil to paper writing, but with both of them creating the story and illustrating it together. I hope that might help a bit.

We did get to the Botanical Garden earlier this week where he played urban farmer for a couple of hours. We did some fun cooking activities, including making honey cake. I was particularly proud of his desire to figure out how many cookies he needs to make if we each want a cookie for dessert for the next 5 or 6 days. Independently, he grabbed a piece of chalk, drew boxes for each day, drew 3 cookies in each box, then added them all together. Great problem solving!

In all we managed an average of 4.5 hours of lessons each day, despite my exhaustion and distraction these days. I can’t imagine being more tired after the abby is born, but if I am and this week is any indication of what we can accomplish, we should do fine. Especially since I’m planning to incorporate more independent computer lessons. I’ll probably seek out some educational DVDs too that I can pair with lessons. There are so many good science and nature shows. Though more than anything I wish there was a Power of Myth for little kids. I might just show it to Rocketboy anyway, in small chunks with lots of discussion.

I was a little worried about the sudden removal of copius amounts of TV from his life – during the summer break (especially at the end) he was watching plenty. This week he has been allowed to watch in the morning before our 9am start, as long as he eats and dresses without any complaint. That amounts to about 2 or 3 half hour shows each morning. Beyond that he has had 1 or 2 shows in the evening, though for a couple of days there was no afternoon TV at all. I am happy to report there was nearly no complaint about it. I guess warning him well ahead of time worked. He’s such a good kid. As much as I feel like it’s a struggle to deal with his whining and intensity sometimes, in reality (and in comparison to many, many other kids I see) he’s consistent about asking permission to do things and generally accepts when we tell him no. It’s great validation that our strictness about certain things is really paying off.