Almost two weeks down

 Two weeks into homeschooling and so far I love it. I say that as we are all having a grumpy day and one of my children even said to me "your face looks mean today." Yes, darling. This is my serious teacher face. The 'no nonsense, I'll just repeat myself until you answer the question' face." BUT... regardless of our grumpiness, I love it.

We start each day by reading a poem from Sing a Song of Seasons poetry book a friend gave me years ago. The girls each have poetry journals they can use to draw the mental images they make as we read the poems. 

We follow this with math from the Right Start math curriculum. It's manipulative and game based, so we often end up with some competitive games before moving on to reading and writing.

Yesterday I realized that we hadn't been to the library since the quarantine began, and that we'd never actually walked to our neighborhood library, despite the fact that it is less than a mile from our house. Maybe less than half a mile. Suddenly, feeling flushed with time, we wandered to the library as a part of our reading adventures. The girls loaded up on books from various genres (we talked about genres - totally a lesson, right?) and headed home to actually read the books we read.

In writing, one of my children announced she wanted to learn how to write plays, so she is working on taking a story she wrote before and turning it into a play. The other daughter is working on a diary with descriptive words to illustrate her days. After an entire six months of her playmates being the Alden children from the Boxcar Children series, her vocabulary is similar to the wholesome Gertrude Warner's stories. I about fell over when I saw she'd written "the sun is delightful and full of music" in her diary. 

For art we tie-dyed shirts and then, because of the evil teacher I am, we wrote how-to story together about how to tie-dye.

I crawled into bed with a sense of peace, or if not peace, at least the feeling you get when you know you are in the right place at the right time.

Of course, it's not all roses and sunbeams. Today we are all slightly grumpy and put off. I'm trying to think about what I want them to do today while also thinking about my mounds of work for my other jobs and projects. To make homeschooling possible I've carefully stacked clients into two days a week, given myself two days of homeschooling with my girls, and a work day. When I'm not with my girls they have work to do on their own. It's a fine balance, but I *think* it's working. And it's incredible to watch them learn.  

One of my other projects is teaching an inclusive augmented learning pod for Joey's Foundation. Check out what we are doing on the blog at their website!