The Faces of Homeschooling
Today, these were the faces of homeschooling in the Gold House:
There should also be a picture of a Kindergartener with a frustrated look on her face, but I figured she might be even more unhappy with me if I took a picture of her in that state.
I usually try and stay positive in my homeschooling week-in-review posts. Sure, I note what didn’t go so well, but it doesn’t necessarily capture the fact that we have some bad days. Sometimes more than one of them in the same week.
This is going to be a short school week for us as it is — we took the day off on Monday since Tony had a work holiday for President’s Day and my mom also stopped by for a couple of hours. And we had our co-op on Wednesday. That left Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for school.
Tuesday started off okay with Bible reading and reading about Abraham Lincoln (a belated choice of reading material for President’s Day). Then Madeline really struggled with her attitude while we were working on phonics. I thought maybe the problem was the materials I was using — we were trying out a book from the library to see if it might work well in tandem with Explode the Code. We never got any other school work done after that.
Fast forward to today. I decided we would return to Explode the Code. So, after Bible reading and a book about China (which Madeline acted much more bored about than usual) we pulled out the ETC workbooks, which Madeline has for the most part enjoyed the last two weeks. Not so much today. I think it took us over an hour to get through some material that should have taken about 15 minutes. It wasn’t even a new concept — just reinforcing words we’ve already been working on. But attitude is everything and hers was just not helpful today. Luckily, she pulled through it and we did move on to working on Math for the first time this week.
Meanwhile, Kai did a bunch of screaming, as you can see in his picture above. He did take a nap in the middle of our school time this morning (thank God for that!), but was still crabby whether in my arms or playing on the floor when he woke up again. Erik, on the other hand, was making things difficult in his own way. He wasn’t too interested in Tot School or participating with Madeline and I today. For the most part he just played. But he is supposed to be working on using the potty without needing “company”. He says he needs help, but really the “helper” just sits and talks with him. I did talk him into going to the potty a couple times without me needing to sit next to him the whole time. But getting him to put his pants back on was another story. As much as I didn’t want to take my focus off Madeline while she was having such a hard time, I had to spend time training Erik in what completing the process of using the potty means — a.k.a putting one’s clothes back on afterwords.
We finally made it through our morning of school. The kids played sweetly together while I made lunch and then after lunch, including a nice tea party and playing house (for some reason Erik’s “house” was in the bathroom, and they were having a slumber party):






















