Welcome to Homeschool!

Originally posted 6/23/11

My Facebook today summed it up nicely:

"Welcome to homeschool...
Rule #1: There's no crying in homeschool.
Rule #2: There's no fighting in homescool.
Rule #3: There's no whining in homeschool.
Rule #4: There's no yelling in homeschool.
Now that we've broken all the rules, maybe we could open some books."

It actually went very smoothly (I'm sure it never will again). I kept putting things off until everything was perfect and the lesson plans were combined and on and on and realistically, it will never be perfect. So my parents bailed on watching the kids today & instead of calling my MIL, we took them and two huge bags of books to work and we just started.

Was it perfect? No. We had left Ereth's Birthday at my parent's house Monday night and I pulled the wrong independent reader for Matthew, but by golly, most everything else got done.

The kids did their reading together (mostly Matthew who's 10 did the read alouds). We discussed the readings, did our lesson in World of Animals and then did Spelling and LA. After a break to watch a movie, they came back individually and finished up LA and did their first lessons in Singapore Math. Emma (7) even did tomorrow's math because she enjoyed it.

We didn't make it to the Habitat book, but Tuesday's my busy day at work and I had to focus at the end of the day when UPS showed up 3 hours late with my big shipment for the week.

I let the kids mark off their assignments as they finished them in my book and that made them so excited. Next week, I'm gonna try that with the chore chart.

Here's hoping that we manage to fit in more lessons this week and that the kids are as agreeable when the grandparents are at work too.

While we were finishing up at work, my 7 yr old shot a podcast about homeschooling with special effects. She was playing with the built in camera on my Mac & just started doing this PSA about how great homeschool was. Once I figure out how, I'll post it. It was funny and sweet. She also interviewed her brother, but that devolved into chaos.