May 23 Monday
This was our first day. There were lots of up but even more downs. The boys saw the lesson as kind of a joke. Each new subject we moved on to I had to convince them once again that we are not “playing” school. This was their school. I would explain what they would be doing at public school at the time. I admit that I even threatened to send them back a time or two… not a good moment. We covered all the subjects on the chart above, it was simplified for my kindergartener, and Gabe 4th grade, and Nic 3rd grade, did not have the same expectations set on them although they covered the same subjects. I don’t have all my curriculum yet so I am using what I do have mixed in with internet resources.
I am learning a lot about the first Native Americans, and about my children. This will be harder than I realized, but at this point I believe, totally worth it.
May 24 Tuesday
Ups and downs, I am looking forward to when the kids don’t smirk when I am animated in a lesson, and when Nic don’t intentionally answer a completely off the wall wrong answer. But that being said today was better then yesterday. A lot.
May 25 Wednesday
We slept in (9:30) so I let the kids play action figures for a while. This makes sense to me somehow. Maybe it is because they have not actually played with their action figures together since school started. There simply has not been time for them to. They get up and go to school in the morning, then come home wore out. Gabe started getting what we call “after school headaches” nearly everyday. I would give him a drink and often a Tylenol and let him lay down for a bit. But a nine year old should deal with it every day. It is bad enough many adults have deal with stress related chronic pain. I love seeing them start to play together again. They did this before starting school three years ago but somehow it has stopped. I realize now it is for two reasons. 1. They don’t have a ton of time together, so they are often not on the same page. 2. The time they do have is often after being wore out at school all day so tempers flare.
Our school day started after their play time, feeding the dog and eating breakfast. They knocked out math quickly because right now until I get textbooks they are reviewing what they know. They are expected to do two worksheets a day of math review. Reading went well, Gabe read in Trails to Explore by A beka. Nic also does trails to explore then they answer the questions out loud to me. Today however Nick read an entire book of short stories to Katie, so I counted that as his lit for the day. Science started out fun, we explored the yard in search of flowers so we could see the parts, and how pollination works. We only found one though but it worked and we had a nice time together. How ever when we tried to read the lesson out of the textbook together the boys would not listen to each others reading. So instead of reading the lesson quickly together then answering the problems in the back out loud I made them write each of the questions out and look up the answers their selves. This is not ideal for me because, although they will be covering handwriting, I don’t want them to have to write out each bit of knowledge they receive. I think that interactive discussions will help them retain the knowledge as well as writing and answering till their hands get sore. For example when we learned about plant classification we did a project, I asked the questions out loud, and then later I would asked them casually “Oh, yeah. I forgot what is a conifer?” Or “Do ferns produce seeds?” And they retained the information. Today however, I don’t know how else to get them to listen to the chapter, other than showing the alternative of a lot of writing if they choose not to?
A trip to the library, history, s.s., Spanish, and group bible study is what we have planed for the remainder of the day. I may put off the library until tomorrow as discipline if they don’t do well on the actual school work. I pray things will come to a balance soon. I don’t like having to be tough on them.
Edit: at the end of the day: after some thought, I decided maybe I was going about it wrong. So I canceled the remainder of the days curriculum and took them to library. They picked out some fiction books and I stocked up on non fiction pertaining to our lessons in the next week and a few educational videos. I have to figure out a way of meeting state standards and still cultivating a love of learning and thirst for knowledge.
Both my kids were considered very well behaved in school. For the most part they listened to their teacher and got great grades. I don’t know why they are trying to rebel for me. I am not going to give up though. It is only the third day after all.
Has anyone else had problems of this nature? How did you solve it?
I wonder sometimes about unschooling. How do you unschoolers meet state standards? How about college admissions for you how do you go about it?
Would these issues be non issues if they were permitted to pursue what actually interests them instead of a planned out curriculum?
