Today may just have been the perfect homeschool day. In the past few months I've had the chance to listen to unschoolers rave about their experiences, and I felt I had to somehow be like them... be an unschooler to get it right.
Well, truth is, nobody in my family does well with the unschooling lifestyle. Not the children, not myself, and certainly not my husband, who likes to really "see" some progress... something he can see and touch, if you will.
And so I decided to give up on the unschooling lifestyle and add more structure to our lives again. This does mean that we do focused "work" on days when we don't go to Village Home for the classes my children take. I was a little nervous about making this change, as my children enjoyed a long summer off with lots of play time, and I didn't know how they would react to this kind of change. Well, I needn't have worried. All is well... more than well as a matter of fact.
This morning I let each child choose which subject they wanted to start their day off with. Toothless Fairy chose to write, then paint. Blue Eyed Boy insisted on finishing the book he started reading a couple of days ago. After they were done I read the second chapter of the book "The Number Devil". And because neither of the children truly understood what they were talking about in the book, I used some notecards to write on, and we learned how to write Roman numerals, discussed the fact that they had no zeros, and therefore had to write their "numbers" in a rather complicated way. They loved putting out their birth years in Roman numerals, but were really impressed just how many letters were needed for my birth year.
Finally we wrote multiplication flash cards with "twos". Both kids were surprised to find out, that they knew much more than expected... 2x3 and 3x2, 2x4 and 4x2, 2x5 and 5x2 etc. By the end of our flash card game Toothless Fairy had the multiplication facts down, and Blue Eyed Boy was still working on it. Both had a blast, and we'll do more next week.
Portland weather has been "good to us". Lots of sunshine, and it's just now starting to cool down and feel a little chilly. It still was warm enough to go for a walk at the nature park and observe the wildlife... snakes, squirrels, caterpillars, birds... After our nature walk we had hot drinks and pastries at the very yummy coffee shop, where we could actually sit outside, because they wind died down long enough to make it comfortably warm.
After a day like this I don't mind the children watching TV... and they've been watching for 3 hours straight... BUT all of the shows are mommy approved. So it's all good.
My wine tastes delicious... and yes, I must say, this just may have been the perfect day, all around.
Where have you BEEN?
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And homeschooling... that's the best thing about it. Your path. Your family. Learning together in the ways that work best for you.
I miss those days and only wish I'd known how soon it would end.
Ami, Facebook has pretty much taken over the whole blog thing. Every now and then I feel like writing something here, but really, what I should be doing is focusing on my actual writing... the editing of my flippin' book, that I wrote last year during NaNoWriMo. I need to make a to-do list.
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