Tweaking.

I spent some time this morning tweaking the schedule and I'm pretty pleased with it  From this side of trying it, it looks wonderful.  It is such a beautiful thing.  I blocked out Monday for math and also part of Wednesday morning, so the kids can meet with their Dad and discuss any problems that they had with the work he assigned on Monday.  The other days, we'll try and get in the writing, biology, spelling, DVDs, woodworking, going to the library, home ec, assigned reading and various other things.  It looks pretty well perfect now and we won't know what the problems are until we actually start it on Monday.  It's kind of like putting a home-made boat on the water for the first time.  It might leak. 

I guess we'll see.

Revisiting an old post.

I went back and read some older posts on my blog.  I particularly enjoyed this one from 3 years ago today.  http://homeschoolhome.blogspot.com/2007/08/back-to-homeschool-week-challenge_06.html

Not sure.

I am not sure how to get everything I want to do into the schedule for this year.  I've been tweaking and squeezing but I can't seem to get it all in.  I'm may have to do a powerpoint presentation or a huge flow chart.  I need one of those big white boards like the physicists have on "The Big Bang Theory."  They make complicated graphs and flow charts to decide what movies to go to or how to make friends.  I'm not sure if I have the brain power to pull it off, but I'm going to try and have a really good plan in place by Monday.

We have to go to the doctor  on Tuesday for my son's ankle, so we'll go ahead and start with the interuptions of school time as soon as possible.  They always happen so we might as well accept it, right?

In other news, today is my daughter's 14th birthday.  So far, we have not planned what we're going to do about it.  We have tentative plans to maybe invite a cousin over tomorrow night and possibly have cake and ice cream at grandmas, also tomorrow.  Dontcha just love the way we are on top of things?     Our celebrations are pretty low key.  We just give our kids money and let them decide whether they want to spend it on themselves or have a celebration.  It kind of takes some of the fun out of it for me, planning parties and choosing gifts,  but I guess, hopefully, it adds to the fun for them?  Anyway, happy birthday to the world's best daughter.  :-)

They're here!

Our school books from Rainbow Resource!  We're going to be ready to start school on Monday.  Trouble is, we didn't get even half of what I planned to get done this summer done.   Oh well.  I never do.  I should be used to it by now.  :-(   We'll see what we can get done in the next 4 days and then just deal with it. 

A thought.

 I wrote out our schedule in the traditional way I do it, touch each subject every day.  It seemed kind of overwhelming.  I started thinking about maybe a block schedule of just math on Mondays, language arts on Tuesday, etc.  I wonder if that would work?  They'd have more time to 'get into' the subject.  Of course it wouldn't work with PE :-0.  I might do a 2 week schedule with math on Mondays, language arts on Tuesday and then use the other 6 days of the 10 days in a 2 week rotation on the other subjects, so they'd be done intensively every other week.  Does that sound too strange? 

Another outing.

In between working we took a trip to a water park with the homeschool group.  When we planned this back in May or June I was all in favor of doing a ton of things this summer but as the busy, busy summer has went on, I've gotten a little outinged out, so to speak.   I'm tired.   I'm ready to stay home indefinitely but probably won't be able to.  I have enough experience with my life to know that it very rarely pauses for long.  And yes, I do realize that it's my fault.  The kids want to go, go go and I often say yes because I know they don't see their friends as often as they like and with us living in such an isolated area there aren't any neighborhood kids.   I kind of will be glad that school's starting next week because I feel like the structure will be good,  but I'm also afraid that it's going to be a little bit overwhelming with work and with the amount of school we need to get done.

So what will be be doing?

Writing - I can't remember the name of the research paper book I ordered and also we will be trying a novel again with Write Your Own Adventure Novel.
Biology - Apologia (leftover from last year)
Algebra 2 - Teaching textbooks.
Geometry - Life of Fred
Prealgebra - Life of Fred
Math review  http://www.aea11.k12.ia.us/e2t2/dmr.html
Typing - Mavis Beacon
Grammar- Grammar with a giggle.
Woodworking - We'll be doing a few projects from www.knock-offwood.com/

We will also be trying a method where they clean for 20 minutes instead of being assigned specific chores.  hopefully, they'll get the hang of seeing what needs to be done and doing it.  We'll see.  We're also going to make sure everyone is able to run the dishwasher, the washing machine and dryer, the bread machine and the stove.  I'm going to have them doing more meal planning and preparation.  I want to make sure that we've got time to do some of the extras like woodworking, watching a bunch of DVDs, etc. so we may have a different schedule on one day of the week, possibly Thursday, that will include these different things. 

Obviously, the schedule I typed yesterday won't be the last version ... you know how I am.  I'll keep tweaking.  :-)

Maybe I'm getting better at this.

I've typed up a tentative schedule and  placed an order from Rainbow Resource.  It didn't take as long as I thought it would.  We should have our things in plenty of time to start school, officially, on August 9th.  The local public schools here start on Wednesday.  Here's a picture of the schedule on my computer.   The kids will probably think it is too ambitious and there will probably be a ton of whining for the first few days weeks.   We just use a simple checklist system around here.  We've tried all different types of schedules and lists but this seems to be what works best.  Someone asked me a couple of weeks ago how long it took the kids to get their school work done each day and I said "2 to 3 hours for the older 2 kids and 16-18 hours a day for the youngest."  He procrastinates a little.  This year we'll be working around the fact that I'll be gone to mom's and working during the middle of the day.  I'm not sure how that will work out.  It seems to me like it's going to be pretty stressful, but I don't know.  I can picture that every day I'll come home and they won't have even gotten started, but I hope that's not the case.

In other news, the beanbag chair is mostly finished.  It just needs some more stuffing.  I was proud of my daughter for following the pattern and even putting in zippers.  There is still quite a bit of styrofoam in the house but we're working on it.  Kind of.  Actually, we haven't done very much today.  All of us have been feeling kind of tired.    Here's a picture of the chair with Freckles in it.  She likes it very much.  Wasn't it thoughtful of my daughter to make her such a nice, big doggy bed?