What am I doing?!

Ha, ha.  That's a funny title.  If you shout it with incredulity, that makes it better.  I'm not, for example, sleeping.  That means the "plan" I'm about to record will not be so smoothly administered tomorrow!  What I'll write is how we homeschool now; it's changed a lot.  I think this is the first year that I really get it: it is my responsibility to educate these children, God is watching, period.  I don't much care what the state has to say, God's standard is, uh, a lot higher.

I learned this year that my learners like to have a list.  So they each have a little book with their daily tasks in it - including chores, music and funny things.  It occurred to me just yesterday that I could write funny things there - and sweet things like "Peter, your diligence is blessing our whole family - thank you for noticing what needs to be done and doing it."  He blushed and dutifully checked that off his list!  Oh how I love him.

For the first time, I made a big chart with each big book/subject listed and all the weeks of the year and it shows me if I am sticking to it enough to finish it this year - it gives me big-picture so I know whats at stake if we blow off a day or week and then I can be accountable to the plan I prayed about and ought to implement.

For the first time, I went away by myself and prayed and prayed and prayed and read through my resources and sorted and made a year-plan for our school.  I guess having a 1st, 2nd and 4th (plus a delightful 2yo!) brought me to the precipice.  Winging it got too scary! (I did not, I did not wing it before, that sounds bad.)

So, what do we do.  In Kindergarten, we learn to read and discover Math is awesome.  My kids have used Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and Singapore Math (just started with 1st bc they played math enough to be ready - Ruby did "school" as play and finished some K stuff)  In First Grade - we add History (Truthquest - love, love) and Science (Apologia creation series - all pleasure) and we do those on the couch, all together.  And some other stuff like Latin, piano, violin, map stuff, cursive, copywork, spelling stuff, drawing, singing, guitar.  Not all at once.  Come see me if you want more detail there.  This year we went nuts on Math and they are all 3 doing different (Singapore, Saxon, Life of Fred).  Through the years we've done an assortment of pray/read/memorize attempts - without much consistency.  I seem to have an enemy who is stealing my Bible time - but they all do reading time in their own bibles each day and whenever they want to - that started when we discovered our favorite Bible ever.

A normal day:
6 am I get up to read/pray alone or with prayer partners (our dad leaves before now)
7 am Boys wake to do exercises (per Dad) and shower; girls get jostled awake.
Kids do animal chores while I make breakfast/shower (ha! this is when I'd exercise)
8:30 do Bible study all together (hurray for Bible Bee sword study 2011!)
Kids start on lists and either work independently or with Mom - at the kitchen table or couch or wherever they can focus and not distract each other.
10:30 Dad calls, I remember I should go load wood burner. (or, I have kids going, I get in shower, silly child comes into bathroom asking if I want to talk to him while I shower?!?)
Mom makes bread or preps dinner or does other chores/food (and generally try to distract my learners)
1:00 I notice we haven't eaten lunch and I haven't loaded the wood burner.  Fix that.
Kids get mad and finish whatever they haven't
2:00 Kids are deeply immersed in playing - so much so that I forget to send Anna to bed until I see Kevin drive down the driveway from school (where he is a "real" teacher).  The hours until bedtime are a blur - don't know where they go.  We play and eat and work around the house.  It's good to be together.

I rarely make their lists in advance, but I take big chunks of late-night time to do library book-requesting (for pick up window) and re-routing plans gone wrong.  Everything else we do together, as we get to it.  I also use late-night hours to either re-fuel with blogs and books and to put my Arbonne business into order so that I can grab quick moments to make calls during the day (I shove them into the nooks and crannies and pray they don't derail our focus).