A Day in Our Homeschool

I’ve almost written a Day in the Life post a bunch of times over the past couple of years but whenever I start to record our activities in detail things usually take a turn toward the insane.  But today we had a great productive day and, luckily, I had decided to give it a shot and started keeping notes first thing this morning.

I think part of our productivity came from setting up some new guidelines for computer play for Georgie.   He doesn’t get to play until after his morning schoolwork (math and language arts) is done and then only during lunch break before we get back to our afternoon schoolwork (science, history, geography, art, etc.).

I also spent the weekend re-organizing (yes, again) and setting up a new plan that makes it easier to add games and fun activities to our day.

We started school at 9:30am.  By this time, we had all finished breakfast and had a chance to wake-up a little.  Vicki is a morning person and wakes up ready to go.  Georgie and I are definitely NOT, so it takes us some time to be ready.

Georgie started with his Handwriting without Tears.  Today’s activity was only one page so it didn’t take very long. 

Vicki wasn’t interested in doing school at first but came in after about 5 minutes and did some alphabet activities I had from Confessions of a Homeschooler.  She didn’t do them for very long before switching to some pictures with spaces for bottle cap letters.   She wasn’t really into either activity.



Georgie started in his binder with a math riddle, where he found the answers to addition problems that were adding 10 to 2 digit numbers.  Each answer matched up to a letter that was placed on lines to give the answer to a riddle.   He likes to try and guess what the answer may be before solving the problems while I keep telling him to get the answers first.



After his math riddle, he had both sides of a page from a Kumon numbers book to trace or write.  We had these last year before I bought HWT but I pulled them out because I feel like HWT isn’t giving him enough practice with writing numbers.  The page had the numbers written inside robots so Georgie had to jump up and act like a robot for a few minutes.  Once he got back to it, he did his usual non-stop mumbling “almost there, almost done, just one more, boy that was hard work”.

It was now 9:40 am.  Yes, all that happened in 10 minutes. 

Vicki switched to her wipe-off books while Georgie did his Explode the Code.  He just started Book 4 which covers dividing into syllables.  So far, he thinks it’s very easy and completed the 8 pages he had to do.  For right now, I’m having him do an entire lesson in one day.  We may slow down if he starts struggling.
Georgie then decided that he wanted to change into his t-shirt from the Insect museum but he didn’t want to walk on the floor in barefeet because it feels cold.



While I was arguing suggesting he just go and change if that’s what he wanted to do, I had my back turned since I was switching laundry around, and Vicki decided to give herself “whiskers” with a dry-erase marker.



At this point, since Georgie was still working on his independent work, I pulled out some paint chip word cards to do with Vicki.  The long strips had consonants on them, while the short cards with the hole in them had word endings.  I started with just the –at word family since that’s what we were working on in The Reading Lesson.  Either she was not feeling cooperative or she’s still not ready for blending since she decided that b –at was ass.

 

She didn’t want to do her Handwriting without Tears (“not that letter stuff again”) or Get Set for the Code.  She did an alphabet dot-to-dot puzzle and we did a Lesson from MEP – Reception, while Georgie finished up his ETC.
   
I told the kids we would go to the museum once we finished school since I have to check some things to set up for future lessons.  Vicki decided she needed to draw a map to the museum treasure while Georgie worked on his puzzle from Scholastic Algebra Readiness Made Easy.

She drew her pirate map and talked non-stop about it…”Let’s say Argh, you say Argh, My Matey, you’re not saying Argh!  You cannot look at the treasure map.   Okay you can take a peek at the treasure map.  I made it, so we have to look all over the museum to find the glow-in-the-dark treasure rocks.  Only I can power up the ship.  Vroom Vroom.”  Georgie’s reply to all this was “We can’t go until I get past this challenge”.  (his Algebra Readiness puzzle). 



At this point it was 10:17 am.  47 minutes of school done.

Vicki ate a granola bar and took off to play Reading Eggs on the computer while Georgie did his Spectrum Language Arts and Spectrum Reading (one lesson which is a two page spread for each).    All the while, he was complaining about having to do math since “I already know math”.  

After a short break for something to eat and despite his extensive knowledge, we went ahead and did math anyway.  He did 4 pages from Math Mammoth which took about 15 minutes and we moved on to All About Spelling.  This lesson was on compound words.  He didn’t have any trouble with the concept of compound words but he missed the spelling of some he should have been able to do by this point.  I think we will review all of AAS Level 1 before we move on to Level 2.

That would normally finish our morning work but I had put together a game to work on math facts over the weekend.  Georgie is definitely not a flash-card or drill kind of kid.  I bought two sets of flash cards over the weekend – addition and subtraction.  I mixed them together, divided the deck in half, then stuck each half into a sock since they were printed on both sides.  We then played War where who ever had the card with the higher answer, kept the cards.  Georgie had a great time with this, especially when he was winning, and didn’t even care that he was drilling math facts.

   

We took about an hour break for lunch and started science shortly after noon.  Our current science topic is Rocks and Minerals and we started it today by studying what’s inside the earth.  Among other things (a more detailed post of this is here), we made a play-doh model of the layers of the earth.

 

After we finished our science, I realized that the museum is not open on Tuesdays so we decided to do some Nature Study instead  (see post here).    We returned to the house around 2:30pm and Georgie and Vicki played on the computer until Daddy came home.

I’m hoping we will continue to have productive days like this one.